the four loves, c. s. lewis
TRANSCRIPT
#3.75
Love has not one, but many faces. C. S.
Lewis, in this candid, wise, and warmly per-
sonal book, describes the four basic kinds
of human love affection, friendship, erotic
love, and the love 'of God. Rarely has anyonemoved so quickly and so unerringly to the
heart of the matter, permitting the reader to
feel that he is sharing in the most intimate
and private thoughts of a rich and free spirit.
The Four Loves explores the possibilities
and the painful problems of the love be-
tween parents and children, the love of menfor men and women for women, of men and
women for each other, and the love of Godwhich may enrich all love. There is tender-
ness and brilliance in this sensitive, but none-
theless relentless, pursuit of understanding
of love's vulnerability. Lewis explores the
problems of sex, possessiveness, jealousy,
pride, false sentimentality, good and bad
manners in loving (it is bad manners to be
formally courteous in intimate moments
there should be no "public faces in private
places"), of the need for more laughter and
play and less solemn technique between
lovers. There are risks that accompany the
rewards.^of love, but C. S. Lewis recom-
mends the risks "hell is the only place out-
side of heaven where we can be safe from
the dangers of love." The Four Loves is a
book of remarkable insight and eloquence.
All who have shared in any of the Four
Loves or who hope to will find it is writ-
ten for them.
Jacket design by Betty Anderson
Also by C. S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters Miracles The Problem of Pain *
Transposition TJ
Pilgrim's Regress The Great Divorce George MacDonald: An Anthology
The Abolition of Man Mere Christianity-
Surprised by Joy Reflections t
the Psalms The World's Last Night FOR CHILDREN: The Lion, the Witch at
S.LEWIS THE FOUR LOVESThat our affections kill us not, nor dye.
DONNE
1960 by Helen Joy Lewis. All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any form or by any mechanical means,
including mimeograph and tape recorder, without permission in
writing from the publisher. First American edition. Library of
Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-10920. Printed in the United
States of America
TO CHAD WALSH
60,171;
CONTENTS
I
Introduction
p. 11
II
Likings and Loves
for the Sub-humanp. 25
HIAffection
p. 53
IVFriendship
p. 87
VEros
p. 131
VICharityp. 163
CHAP TER I
INTRODUCTION
"GOD is love,"
says St. John. When I first tried to write this book I
thought that his maxim would provide me with a very
plain highroad through the whole subject. I thought
I should be able to say that human loves deserved to
be called loves at all just in so far as they resembled
that Love which is God. The first distinction I made
was therefore between what I called ^ffi4pve and.
Need-love. The typical example of Gift-love would
be that love which moves a man to work and plan
and save for the future well-being of his family which
he will die without sharing or seeing; of the second,
that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its
mother's arms.
There was no doubt which was more like Love Him-
self. Divine Love is Gift-love. The Father gives all He
is and has to the Son. The Son gives Himself back to
the Father, and gives Himself to the world, and for the
world to the Father, and thus gives the world (in Him-
self) back to the Father too.
And what, on the other hand, can be less like any-
thing we believe of God's life than Need-love? He
U 1)
THE FOUR LOVES
lacks nothing, but our Need-love, as Plato saw, Is
"the son of Poverty." It is the accurate reflection in
consciousness of our actual nature. We are born help-
less. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover
loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally,
intellectually; we need them if we are to know any-
thing, even ourselves.
I was looking forward to writing some fairly easy
panegyrics on the first sort of love and disparagements
of the second. And much of what I was going to say
still seems to me to be true. I still think that if all we
mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a
very deplorable state. But I would not now say (with
my master, MacDonald) that if we mean only this
craving we are mistaking for love something that is
not love at all. I cannot now deny the name love to
Need-love. Every time I have tried to think the thing
out along those lines I have ended in puzzles and con-
tradictions. The reality is more complicated than I
supposed.
First of all, we do violence to most languages, in-
cluding our own, if we do not call Need-love "love."
Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it
contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored in-
sight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has
a way of avenging itself later on. We had better not
follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean what-
ever we please.
Secondly, we must be cautious about calling Need-
123
Introduction
love "mere selfishness." Mere is always a dangerousword. No doubt Need-love, like all our impulses, can
be selfishly indulged. A tyrannous and gluttonous
demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in
ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it
turns for comfort to its mother; nor an adult who turns
to his fellow "for company." Those, whether children
or adults, who do so least are not usually the most
selfless. Where Need-love is felt there may be reasons
for denying or totally mortifying it; but not to feel it
is in general the mark of the cold egoist. Since we do
inreality
need one another ("it is not good for manto be alone") , then the failure of this need to appear
as Need-love in consciousness in other words, the
illusory feeling that it is good for us to be alone is
a bad spiritual symptom; just as lack of appetite is a
bad medical symptom because men do really need
food.
But thirdly, we come to something far more im-
portant. Every Christian would agree that a man's
spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for
God. But man's love for God, from the very nature of
the case, must always be very largely, and must often
be entirely, a Need-love. This is obvious when we im-
plore forgiveness for our sins or support in our tribu-
lations. But in the long run it is perhaps even more
apparent in our growing for it ought to be grow-
ing awareness that our whole being by its very na-
ture is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty
C13]
THE FOUR LOVES
yet cluttered, crying out for Him wlio can untie things
that are now knotted together and tie up things that
are still dangling loose. I do not say that man can
never bring to God anything at all but sheer Need-love.
Exalted souls may tell us of a reach beyond that.
But they would also, I think, be the first to tell us that
those heights would cease to be true Graces, would
become Neo-Platonic or finally diabolical illusions, the
moment a man dared to think that he could live on
them and henceforth drop out the element of need.
"The highest," says the Imitation, "does not stand
without the lowest." It would be a bold and silly crea-
ture that came before its Creator with the boast "I'm
no beggar. I love you disinterestedly." Those who
come nearest to a Gift-love for God will next moment,
even at the very same moment, be beating their breasts
with the publican and laying their indigence before the
only real Giver. And God will have it so. He addresses
our Need-love: "Come unto me all ye that travail and
are heavy-laden," or, in the Old Testament, "Open
your mouth wide and I will fill it."
Thus one Need-love, the greatest of all, either coin-
cides with or at least makes a main ingredient in
man's highest, healthiest, and most realistic spiritual
condition. A very strange corollary follows. Man ap-
proaches God most nearly when he is in one sense
least like God. For what can be more unlike than full-
ness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteous-
ness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?
{14}
Introduction
This paradox staggered me when I first ran into it;
it also wrecked all my previous attempts to write about
love. When we face it, something like this seems to
result.
We must distinguish two things which might both
possibly be called "nearness to God." One is likeness
to God. God has impressed some sort of likeness to
Himself, I suppose, in all that He has made. Spaceand time, in their own fashion, mirror His greatness;
all life, His fecundity; animal life, His activity. Man has
a more important likeness than these by being ra-
tional. Angels, we believe, have likenesses which Manlacks: immortality and intuitive knowledge. In that
way all men, whether good or bad, all angels includ-
ing those that fell, are more like God than the animals
are. Their natures are in this sense "nearer" to the
Divine Nature. But, secondly, there is what we maycall nearness of approach. If this is what we mean, the
states in which a man is "nearest" to God are those in
which he is most surely and swiftly approaching his
final union with God, vision of God and enjoyment
of God. And as soon as we distinguish nearness-by-
likeness and nearness-of-approach, we see that they
do not necessarily coincide. They may or may not.
Perhaps an analogy may help. Let us suppose that
we are doing a mountain walk to the village which is
our home. At mid-day we come to the top of a cliff
where we are, in space, very near it because it is just
below us. We could drop a stone into it. But as we are
CIS}
THE FOUR LOVES
no cragsmen we can't get down. We must go a long
way round; five miles, maybe. At many points during
that detour we shall, statically, be farther from the
village than we were when we sat above the cliff. But
only statically. In terms of progress we shall be far
"nearer" our baths and teas.
Since God is blessed, omnipotent, sovereign and
creative, there is obviously a sense in which happiness,
strength, freedom and fertility (whether of mind 01
body), wherever they appear in human life, constitute
likenesses, and in that way proximities, to God. But
no one supposes that the possession of these gifts has
any necessary connection with our sanctification. No
kind of riches is a passport to the Kingdom of Heaven.
At the cliffs top we are near the village, but how-
ever long we sit there we shall never be any nearer to
our bath and our tea. So here; the likeness, and
in that sense nearness, to Himself which God has con-
ferred upon certain creatures and certain states ol
those creatures is something finished, built in. Whal
is near Him by likeness is never, by that fact alone,
going to be any nearer. But nearness of approach is.
by definition, increasing nearness. And whereas the
likeness is given to us and can be received with 01
without thanks, can be used or abused the ap-
proach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is
something we must do. Creatures are made in theii
varying ways images of God without their own col-
laboration or even consent. It is not so that they be-
Introduction
come sons of God. And the likeness they receive by
sonship is not that of images or portraits. It is in one
way more than likeness, for it is union or unity with
God in will; but this is consistent with all the differ-
ences we have been considering. Hence, as a better
writer has said, our imitation of God in this life that
is, our willed imitation as distinct from any of the like-
nesses which He has impressed upon our natures or
states must be an imitation of God incarnate: our
model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the
workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous de-
mands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and
privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely un-
like anything we can attribute to the Divine life in it-
self, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life
operating under human conditions.
I must now explain why I have found this distinc-
tion necessary to any treatment of our loves. St. John's
saying that God is love has long been balanced in mymind against the remark of a modern author
(M. Denis de Rougemont) that "love ceases to be a
.dQinpn only wrhen he ceases to be a gocP; wS3BTc3T
course can be re-statQ^m^t^^TM^^^ns to be a
demon the moment he begins to be a god." This bal-
ance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we
ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to
mean for us the converse, that love is God.
I suppose that everyone who has thought about the
matter will see what M. de Rougemont meant. Every
r 1 1
THE FOUR LOVES
human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for
itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if
it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count
the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it at-
tempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates
that any action which is sincerely done "for love's
sake" is thereby lawful and even meritorious. That
erotic love and love of one's country may thus attempt
to "become gods" is generally recognised. But family
affection may do the same. So, in a different way, may
friendship. I shall not here elaborate the point, for it
will meet us again and again in later chapters.
Now it must be noticed that the natural loves make
this blasphemous claim not when they are in their
worst, but when they are in thek best, natural con-
dition; when they are what our grandfathers called
"pure" or "noble." This is especially obvious in the
erotic sphere. A faithful and genuinely self-sacrificing
passion will speak to us with what seems the voice of
God, Merely animal or frivolous lust will not. It will
corrupt its addict in a dozen ways, but not in
that way; a man may act upon such feelings but he
cannot revere them any more than a man whoscratches reveres the itch. A silly woman's temporary
indulgence, which is really self-indulgence, to a
spoiled child her living doll while the fit lasts Is
much less likely to "become a god" than the deep,
narrow devotion of a woman who (quite really) "lives
for her son." And I am inclined to think that the sort
18}
Introduction
of love for a man's country which is worked up bybeer and brass bands will not lead bim to do muchharm (or much good) for her sake. It will probablybe fully discharged by ordering another drink and
joining in the chorus.
And this of course is what we ought to expect. Our
loves do not make their claim to divinity until the
claim becomes plausible. It does not become plausible
until there is in them a real resemblance to God, to
Love Himself. Let us here make no mistake. Our
Gift-loves are really God-like; and among our
Gift-loves those are most God-like which are most
boundless and unwearied in giving. All the things the
poets say about them are true. Their joy, their
energy, their patience, their readiness to forgive, their
desire for the good of the beloved all this is a real
and all but adorable image of the Divine life. In its
presence we are right to thank God "who has given
such power to men." We may say, quite truly and in
an intelligible sense, that those who love greatly are
"near" to God. But of course it is "nearness by like-
ness." It will not of itself produce "nearness of ap-
proach." The likeness has been given us. It has no
necessary connection with that slow and painful ap-
proach which must be our own (though by no means
our unaided) task. Meanwhile, however, the likeness
is a splendour. That is why we may mistake Like for
Same. We may give our human loves the uncondi-
tional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then
119)
THE FOUR LOVES
they become gods: then they become demons. Then
they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For
natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not
remain loves. They are still called so, but can become
in fact complicated forms of hatred.
Our Need-loves may be greedy and exacting but
they do not set up to be gods. They are not near
enough (by likeness) to God to attempt that.
It follows from what has been said that we must
join neither the idolaters nor the "debunkers" of hu-
man love. Idolatry both of erotic love and of "the
domestic affections" was the great error of nineteenth-
century literature. Browning, Kingsley, and Patmore
sometimes talk as if they thought that falling in
love was the same thing as sanctification; the novelists
habitually oppose to "the World" not the Kingdomof Heaven but the home. We live in the reaction
against this. The debunkers stigmatise as slush and
sentimentality a very great deal of what their fathers
said in praise of love. They are always pulling up and
exposing the grubby roots of our natural loves. But I
take it we must listen neither "to the over-wise nor
to the over-foolish giant." The highest does not stand
without the lowest. A plant must have roots below as
weU as sunlight above and roots must be grubby.
Much of the grubbiness is clean dirt if only you will
leave it in the garden and not keep on sprinkling it
over the library table. The human loves can be glori-
ous images of Divine love. No less than that: but also
20}
Introduction
no more proximities of likeness which in one in-
stance may help, and in another may hinder, proxim-
ity of approach. Sometimes perhaps they have not
very much to do with it either way.
121}
CHAP TER II
LIKINGSAND LOVES
FORTHE
SUB-HUMAN
MOST of mygeneration were reproved as children for saying that
we "loved" strawberries, and some people take a pride
in the fact tfiat English has the two verbs love and
like while French has to get on with aimer for both.
But French has a good many other languages on its
side. Indeed it very often has actual English usage
on its side too. Nearly all speakers, however pedantic
or however pious, talk every day about "loving" a
food, a game, or a pursuit. And in fact there is a con-
tinuity between our elementary likings for things and
our loves for people. Since "the highest does not stand
without the lowest" we had better begin at the bot-
tom, with mere likings; and since to "like" anything
means to take some sort of pleasure m it, we must be-
gin with pleasure.
Now it is a very old discovery that pleasures can
be divided into two classes; those which would not be
pleasures at all unless they were preceded by desire,
and those which are pleasures in their own right and
need no such preparation. An- example of the first
would be a drink of water. This is a pleasure if you are
C25)
THE FOUR LOVES
thirsty and a great one if you are very thirsty. But
probably no one in the world, except in obedience to
thirst or to a doctor's orders, ever poured himself
out a glass of water and drank it just for the fun of
the thing. An example of the other class would be the
unsought and unexpected pleasures of smell the
breath from a bean-field or a row of sweet-peas meet-
ing you on your morning walk. You were in want of
nothing, completely contented, before it; the pleasure,
which may be very great, is an unsolicited, super-
addedgift. I am taking very simple instances for clar-
ity's sake, and of course there are many com-
plications. If you are given coffee or beer where you
expected (and would have been satisfied with) water,
then of course you get a pleasure of the first kind (al-
laying of thirst) and one of the second (a nice taste)
at the same time. Again, an addiction may turn what
was once a pleasure of the second kind into one of
the first. For the temperate man an occasional glass
of wine is a treat like the smell of the bean-field. But
to the alcoholic, whose palate and digestion have long
since been destroyed, no liquor gives any pleasure
except that of relief from an unbearable craving. So
far as he can still discern tastes at all, he rather dis-
likes it; but it is better than the misery of remaining
sober. Yet through all their permutations and com-
binations the distinction between the two classes re-
mains tolerably clear. We may call them Need-pleas-
ures and Pleasures of Appreciation.
C26}
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
The resemblance between these Need-pleasures andthe "Need-loves" in my first chapter will occur to
everyone. But there, you remember, I confessed that
I had had to resist a tendency to disparage the Need-loves or even to say they were not loves at all. Here,for most people, there may be an opposite inclination.
It would be very easy to spread ourselves in laudation
of the Need-pleasures and to frown upon those that
are Appreciative: the one so natural (a word to con-
jure with), so necessary, so shielded from excess bytheir very naturalness, the other unnecessary and
opening the door to every kind of luxury and vice. If
we were short of matter on this theme we could turn
on the tap by opening the works of the Stoics andit would run till we had a bathful. But throughout this
inquiry we must be careful never to adopt pre-
maturely a moral or evaluating attitude. The humanmind is generally far more eager to praise and dis-
praise than to describe and define. It wants to make
every distinction a distinction of value; hence those
fatal critics who can never point out the differing
quality of two poets without putting them in an order
of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.
We must do nothing of the sort about the pleasures.
The reality is too complicated. We are already
warned of this by the fact that Need-pleasure is the
state in which Appreciative pleasures end up when
they go bad (by addiction) .
For us at any rate the importance of the two sorts
[27}
THE FOUR LOVES
of pleasure lies in the extent to which they fore-
shadow characteristics in our 'loves" (properly so
called).
The thirsty man who has just drunk off a tumbler
of water may say, "By Jove, I wanted that." So maythe alcoholic who has just had his "nip." The man
who passes the sweet-peas in his morning walk is
more likely to say, "How lovely the smell is." The
connoisseur after his first sip of the famous claret,
may similarly say, "This is a great wine." When
Need-pleasures are in question we tend to make state-
ments about ourselves in the past tense; when Ap-
preciative pleasures are in question we tend to make
statements about the object in the present tense. It
is easy to see why.
Shakespeare has described the satisfaction of a
tyrannous lust as something
Past reason hunted and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated.
But the most innocent and necessary of Need-
pleasures have about them something of the same
character only something, of course. They are not
hated once we have had them, but they certainly
"die on us" with extraordinary abruptness, and com-
pletely. The scullery tap and the tumbler are very
attractive indeed when we come in parched from
mowing the grass; six seconds later they are emptiedof all interest. The smell of frying food is very differ-
{28}
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
ent before and after breakfast. And, if you will forgive
me for citing the most extreme instance of all, have
there not for most of us been moments (in a strange
town) when the sight of the word GENTLEMEN over
a door has roused a joy almost worthy of celebration
in verse?
Pleasures of Appreciation are very different. Theymake us feel that something has not merely gratified
our senses in fact but claimed our appreciation by
right. The connoisseur does not merely enjoy his
claret as he might enjoy warming his feet when they
were cold. He feels that here is a wine that deserves
his full attention; that justifies all the tradition and
skill that have gone to its making and all the years
of training that have made his own palate fit to judge
it. There is even a glimmering of unselfishness in his
attitude. He wants the wine to be preserved and kept
in good condition, not entirely for his own sake. Even
if he were on his death-bed and was never going to
drink wine again, he would be horrified at the thought
of this vintage being spilled or spoiled or even drunk
by clods (like myself) who can't tell a good claret
from a bad. And so with the man who passes the
sweet-peas. He does not simply enjoy, he feels that
this fragrance somehow deserves to be enjoyed. He
would blame himself if he went past inattentive and
undelighted. It would be blockish, insensitive. It
would be a shame that so fine a thing should have
been wasted on him. He will remember the delicious
{29}
THE FOUR LOVES
moment years hence. He will be sorry when he hears
that the garden past which his walk led him that dayhas now been swallowed up by cinemas, garages, and
the new by-pass.
Scientifically both sorts of pleasure are, no doubt,
relative to our organisms. But the Need-pleasures
loudly proclaim their relativity not only to the human
frame but to its momentary condition, and out-
side that relation have no meaning or interest for us
at all. The objects which afford pleasures of appre-
ciation give us the feeling whether irrational or not
that we somehow owe it to them to savour, to at-
tend to and praise it. "It would be a sin to set a wine
like that before Lewis," says the expert in claret. "Howcan you walk past this garden taking no notice of the
smell?" we ask. But we should never feel this about
a Need-pleasure: never blame ourselves or others
for not having been thirsty and therefore walking past
a well without taking a drink of water.
How the Need-pleasures foreshadow our Need-
loves is obvious enough. In the latter the beloved is
seen in relation to our own needs, just as the scullery
tap is seen by the thirsty man or the glass of gin bythe alcoholic. And the Need-love, like the Need-
pleasure, will not last longer than the need. This does
not, fortunately, mean that all affections which begin
in Need-love are transitory. The need itself may be
permanent or recurrent. Another kind of love maybe grafted on the Need-love. Moral principles (con-
f 30}
Likings and Loves for the &ub-TLuman
jugal fidelity, filial piety, gratitude, and the like)
may preserve the relationship for a lifetime. But where
Need-love is left unaided we can hardly expect it not
to "die on us" once the need is no more. That is whythe world rings with the complaints of mothers whose
grown-up children neglect them and of forsaken
mistresses whose lovers* love was pure need which
they have satisfied. Our Need-love for God is in a
different position because our need of Him can never
end either in this world or in any other. But
our awareness of it can, and then the Need-love dies
too. "The Devil was sick, the Devil a monk would
be." There seems no reason for describing as hypo-
critical the short-lived piety of those whose religion
fades away once they have emerged from "danger,
necessity, or tribulation." Why should they not have
been sincere? They were desperate and they howled
for help. Who wouldn't?
What Appreciative pleasure foreshadows is not so
quickly described.
First of all, it is the starting point for our whole
experience of beauty. It is impossible to draw a line
below which such pleasures are "sensual" and above
which they are "aesthetic." The experiences of the
expert in claret akeady contain elements of concen-
tration, judgment, and disciplined perceptiveness,
which are not sensual; those of the musician still con-
tain elements which are. There is no frontier
there is seamless continuity between the sensuous
3 1]
THE FOUR LOVES
pleasure of garden smells and an enjoyment of the
countryside (or "beauty") as a whole, or even our
enjoyment of the painters and poets who treat it.*
And, as we have seen, there is in these pleasures
from the very beginning a shadow or dawn of, or an
invitation to, disinterestedness. Of course in one waywe can be disinterested or unselfish, and far more
heroically so, about the Need-pleasures: it is a cup of
water that the wounded Sidney sacrifices to the dying
soldier. But that is not the sort of disinterestedness I
now mean. Sidney loves his neighbour. But in the
Appreciative pleasures, even at their lowest, and
more and more as they grow up into the full apprecia-
tion of all beauty, we get something that we can
hardly help calling love and hardly help calling dis-
interested, towards the object itself. It is the feeling
which would make a man unwilling to deface a great
picture even if he were the last man left alive and
himself about to die; which makes us glad of
unspoiled forests that we shall never see; which makes
us anxious that the garden or bean-field should con-
tinue to exist. We do not merely like the things; we
pronounce them, in a momentarily God-like sense,
"very good."
And now our principle of starting at the lowest
without which "the highest does not stand" begins
to pay a dividend. It has revealed to me a deficiency
in our previous classification of the loves into those of
Need and those of Gift. There is a third element in
{32}
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
love, no less important than these, which is fore-
shadowed by our Appreciative pleasures. This judg-
ment that the object is very good, this attention (al-
most homage) offered to it as a kind of debt, this wish
that it should be and should continue being what it
is even if we were never to enjoy it, can go out not
only to things but to persons. When it is offered to a
woman we call it admiration; when to a man, hero-
worship; when to God, worship simply.
Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love
longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative
love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great
glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live
without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness,
comfort, protection if possible, wealth; Appre-
ciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent,
rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not
for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her,
would rather have it so than never to have seen her
at all.
We murder to dissect. In actual life, thank God,
the three elements of love mix and succeed one an-
other, moment by moment. Perhaps none of them
except Need-love ever exists alone, in "chemical" pu-
rity, for more than a few seconds. And perhaps that is
because nothing about us except our neediness is, in
this life, permanent.
Two forms of love for what is not personal demand
special treatment.
33}
THE FOUR LOVES
For some people, perhaps especially for English-
men and Russians, what we call "the love of nature"
is a permanent and serious sentiment. I mean here
that love of nature which cannot be adequately clas-
sified simply as an instance of our love for beauty. Of
course many natural objects trees, flowers and ani-
mals are beautiful But the nature-lovers whom I
have in mind are not very much concerned with
individual beautiful objects of that sort. The manwho is distracts them. An enthusiastic botanist is for
them a dreadful companion on a ramble. He is
always stopping to draw their attention to par-
ticulars. Nor are they looking for "views" or land-
scapes. Wordsworth, their spokesman, strongly
deprecates this. It leads to "a comparison of scene
with scene," makes you "pamper" yourself with
"meagre novelties of colour and proportion." While
you are busying yourself with this critical and dis-
criminating activity you lose what really matters
the "moods of time and season," the "spirit" of the
place. And of course Wordsworth is right. That is
why, if you love nature in his fashion, a landscape
painter is (out of doors) an even worse companionthan a botanist.
It is the "moods" or the "spirit" that matter.
Nature-lovers want to receive as fully as possible what-
ever nature, at each particular time and place, is,
so tCLspteak> saying., The obvious richness, grace, and
harmony of some scenes are no more precious to
{341
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
them than the grimness, bleakness, terror, monotony,or "visionary dreariness" of others. The featureless it-
self gets from them a willing response. It is one more
word uttered by nature. They lay themselves bare to
the sheer quality of every countryside, every hour of
the day. They want to absorb it into themselves, to
be coloured through and through by it.
This experience, like so many others, after beinglauded to the skies in the nineteenth century, has been
debunked by the moderns. And one must certainly
concede to the debunkers that Wordsworth, not when
he was communicating it as a poet, but when he was
merely talking about it as a philosopher (or philoso-
phaster) , said some very silly things. It is silly, unless
you have found any evidence, to believe that flowers
enjoy the air they breathe, and sillier not to add that,
if this were true, flowers would undoubtedly have
pains as well as pleasures. Nor have many people
been taught moral philosophy by an "impulse from a
vernal wood."
If they were, it would not necessarily be the sort of
moral philosophy Wordsworth would have approved.
It might be that of ruthless competition. For some
moderns I think it is. They love nature in so far as, for
them, she calls to "the dark gods in the blood"; not
although, but because, sex and hunger and sheer
power there operate without pity or shame.
If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you
exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn;
THE FOUR LOVES
this is only another way of saying that nature does
not teach. The tendency to take her as a teacher
is -obviously very easily grafted on to the experience
we call "love of nature." But it is only a graft. While
we are actually subjected to them, the "moods" and
"spirits" of nature point no morals. Overwhelming
gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation
are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you
must make at all. The only imperative that nature
utters is, "Look. Listen. Attend."
The fact that this imperative is so often misinter-
preted and sets people making theologies and panthe-
ologies and antitheologies all of which can be de-
bunked does not really touch the central experi-
ence itself. What nature:loyers whether they are
Wordsworthians or people with "dark gods in their
blood" get from nature is an iconography., a lan-
guage of images. I do not mean simply visual images;
it is the "moods" or "spirits" themselves the power-
ful expositions of terror, gloom, jocundity, cruelty,
lust, innocence, purity that are the images. In them
each man can clothe his own belief. We must learn
our theology or philosophy elsewhere (not surpris-
ingly, we^often learn them from theologians and phi-
losophers).
But when I speak of "clothing" our belief in such
images I do not mean anything like using nature for
similes or metaphors in the manner of the poets. In-
36)
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
deed I might have said "filling" or "incarnating"
rather than clothing. Many people I am one myself
would never, but for what nature does to us, have
had any content to put into the words we must use
in confessing our faith. Nature never taught me that
there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I
had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the
word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know
where else I could have found one. I do not see how
the "fear" of God could have ever meant to me any-
thing but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I
had never seen certain ominous ravines and unap-
proachable crags. And if nature had never awakened
certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now
mean by the "love" of God would never, so far as I
can see, have existed.
Of course the fact that a Christian can so use na-
ture is not even the beginning of a proof that Chris-
tianity is true. Those suffering from Dark Gods can
equally use her (I suppose) for their creed. That is
precisely the point. Nature does not teach. A true
philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of
nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a
philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or
metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we
are now considering); she will help to show what it
means.
And not, on the Christian premises, by accident.
37}
THE FOUR LOVES
The created glory may be expected to give us hints of
the uncreated; for the one is derived from the other
and in some fashion reflects it.
In some fashion. But not perhaps in so direct and
simple a fashion as we at first might suppose. For of
course all the facts stressed by nature-lovers of the
other school are facts too; there are worms in the belly
as well as primroses in the wood. Try to reconcile
them, or to show that they don't really need recon-
ciliation, and you are turning from direct experience
of nature our present subject to metaphysics or
theodicy., or something of that sort. That may be a
sensible thing to do; but I think it should be kept
distinct from the love of nature. While we are on that
level, while we are still claiming to speak of what na-
ture has directly "said" to us, we must stick to it. Wehave seen an image of glory. We must not try to find
a direct path through it and beyond it to an increas-
ing knowledge of God. The path peters out almost at
once. Terrors and mysteries, the whole depth of God's
counsels and the whole tangle of the history of the
universe, choke it. We can't get through; not that way.We must make a detour leave the hills and woods
and go back to our studies, to church, to our Bibles,
to our knees. Otherwise the love of nature is begin-
ning to turn into a nature religion. And then, even
if it does not lead us to the Dark Gods, it will lead us
to a great deal of nonsense.
But we need not surrender the love of nature
138}
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
chastened and limited as I have suggested to the
debunkers. Nature cannot satisfy the desires she
arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify
us. Our real journey to God involves constantly turn-
ing our backs on her; passing from the dawn-lit fields
into some poky little church, or (it might be) goingto work in an East End parish. But the love of her has
been a valuable and, for some people, an indispensa-
ble initiation.
I need not say "has been." For in fact those who
allow no more than this to the love of nature seem to
be those who retain it. This is what one should expect.
This love, when it sets up as a religion, is beginning to
be a god therefore to be a demon. And demons
never keep their promises. Nature "dies" on those
who try to live for a love of nature. Coleridge ended
by being insensible to her; Wordsworth, by lamenting
that the gloiy had passed away. Say your prayers in a
garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds
and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed
by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be over-
whelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of
ten nothing will happen to youjI turn now to the love of one's country. Here there is
no need to labour M. de Rougemont's maxim; we all
know now that this love becomes a demon when it
becomes a god. Some begin to suspect that it is never
anything but a demon. But then they have to reject
half the high poetry and half the heroic action our
{39}
THE FOUR LOVES
race has achieved. We cannot keep even Christ's la-
ment over Jerusalem. He too exhibits love for His
country.
Let us limit our field. There is no need here for an
essay on international ethics. When this love becomes
demoniac it will of course produce wicked acts. But
others, more skilled, may say what acts between na-
tions are wicked. We are only considering the senti-
ment itself in the hope of being able to distinguish its
innocent from its demoniac condition. Neither of
these is the efficient cause of national behaviour. For
strictly speaking it is rulers, not nations, who behave
internationally. Demoniac patriotism in their subjects
I write only for subjects will make it easier for
them to act wickedly; healthy patriotism may make it
harder; when they are wicked they may by propa-
ganda encourage a demoniac condition of our senti-
ments in order to secure our acquiescence in their
wickedness. If they are good, they could do the op-
posite. That is one reason why we private persons
should keep a wary eye on the health or disease of our
own love for our country. And that is what I am writ-
ing about.
How ambivalent patriotism is may be gauged by
the fact that no two writers have expressed it more
vigorously than Kipling and Chesterton. If it were one
element two such men could not both have praised it.
In reality it contains many ingredients, of which
many different blends are possible.
{40}
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
First, there is love of home, of the place we grew
up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been
our homes; and of all places fairly near these and
fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar
sights, sounds and smells. Note that at its largest this
is, for us, a love of England, Wales, Scotland, or
Ulster. Only foreigners and politicians talk about
"Britain." Kipling's "I do not love my empire's foes"
strikes a ludicrously false note. My empire! With this
love for the place there goes a love for the way of life;
for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compart-
ments in them and an unarmed police force and all
the rest of it; for the local dialect and (a shade less)
for our native language. As Chesterton says, a man's
reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by
foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting
his house to be burned down; because he "could not
even begin'* to enumerate all the things he would
miss.
It would be hard to find any legitimate point of
view from which this feeling could be condemned. As
the family offers us the first step beyond self-love, so
this offers us the first step beyond family selfishness.
Of course it is not pure charity; it involves love of our
neighbours in the local, not of our Neighbour, in the
Dominical, sense. But those who do not love the
fellow-villagers or fellow-townsmen whom they have
seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving
"Man" whom they have not. All natural affections,
141}
THE FOUR LOVES
including this, can become rivals to spiritual love: but
they can also be preparatory imitations of it, training
(so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace
may later put to a higher service; as women nurse
dolls in childhood and later nurse children. There
may come an occasion for renouncing this love; pluckout your right eye. But you need to have an eye first:
a creature which had none which had only got so
far as a "photo-sensitive" spot would be very ill
employed in meditation on that severe text.
Of course patriotism of this kind is not in the least
aggressive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes
militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind
which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a
good attitude towards foreigners. How can I love myhome without coming to realise that other men, no
less rightly,, love theirs? Once you have realised that
the Frenchmen like cafe complet just as we like
bacon and eggs why, good luck to them and let
them have it. The last thing we want is to make every-
where else just like our own home. It would not be
home unless it were different.
The second ingredient is a particular attitude to
our country's past. I mean to that past as it lives in
popular imagination; the great deeds of our an-
cestors. Remember Marathon. Remember Waterloo.
"We must be free or die who speak the tongue that
Shakespeare spoke." This past is felt both to imposean obligation and to hold out an assurance; we must
142}
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
not fall below the standard our fathers set us, and be-
cause we are their sons there is good hope we shall
not.
This feeling has not quite such good credentials as
the sheer love of home. The actual history of every
country is full of shabby and even shameful doings.
The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false
impression of it and are often themselves open to
serious historical criticism. Hence a patriotism based
on our glorious past is fair game for the debunker. As
knowledge increases it may snap and be converted
into disillusioned cynicism, or may be maintained bya voluntary shutting of the eyes. But who can con-
demn what clearly makes many people, at many im-
portant moments, behave so much better than they
could have done without its help?
I think it is possible to be strengthened by the
image of the past without being either deceived or
puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the pre-
cise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for
serious and systematic historical study. The stories
are best when they are handed on and accepted as
stories. I do not mean by this that they should
be handed on as mere fictions (some of them are
after all true) . But the emphasis should be on the tale
as such, on the picture which fires the imagination,
the example that strengthens the will. The school-
boy who hears them should dimly feel though of
course he cannot put it into words that he is hearing
43}
THE FOUR LOVES
saga. Let him be thrilled preferably "out of school"
by the "Deeds that won the Empire"; but the less
we mix this up with his "history lessons" or mistake
it for a serious analysis worse still, a justification
of imperial policy, the better. When I was a child
I had a book full of coloured pictures called Our Is-
land Story. That title has always seemed to me to
strike exactly the right note. The book did not look
at all like a text-book either. What does seem to me
poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is
pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an
educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrina-
tion of the young in knowably false or biased history
the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book
fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that
other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps
even the belief surely it is very bad biology that
we can literally "inherit" a tradition. And these al-
most inevitably lead on to a third thing that is some-
times called patriotism.
This third thing is not a sentiment but a belief: a
firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober
fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to
all others. I once ventured to say to an old clergymanwho was voicing this sort of patriotism, "But, sir,
aren't we told that every people thinks its own menthe bravest and its own women the fairest in the
world?" He replied with total gravity he could not
have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at
f44}
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
the altar "Yes, but in England it's true." To be sure,
this conviction had not made my friend (God rest his
soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass. It
can however produce asses that kick and bite. On the
lunatic fringe it may shade off into that popular Ra-
cialism which Christianity and science equally for-
bid.
This brings us to the fourth ingredient. If our na-
tion is really so much better than others it may be held
to have either the duties or the rights of a superior
being towards them. In the nineteenth century the
English became very conscious of such duties: the
"white man's burden." What we called natives were
our wards and we their self-appointed guardians.
This was not all hypocrisy. We did do them some
good. But our habit of talking as if England's motives
for acquiring an empire (or any youngster's motives
for seeking a job in the Indian Civil Service) had
been mainly altruistic nauseated the world. And yet
this showed the sense of superiority working at its
best. Some nations who have also felt it have stressed
the rights not the duties. To them, some foreigners
were so bad that one had the right to exterminate
them. Others, fitted only to be hewers of wood and
drawers of water to the chosen people, had better be
made to get on with their hewing and drawing. Dogs,
know your betters! I am far from suggesting that the
two attitudes are on the same level. But both are fatal.
Both demand that the area in which they operate
t45}
THE FOUR LOVES
should grow "wider still and wider." And both have
about them this sure mark of evil: only by being ter-
rible do they avoid being comic. If there were no
broken treaties with Redskins, no extermination of
the Tasmanians, no gas-chambers and no Belsen, no
Amritsar, Black and Tans or Apartheid, the pompos-
ity of both would be roaring farce.
Finally we reach the stage where patriotism in its
demoniac form unconsciously denies itself. Chesterton
picked on two lines from Kipling as the perfect ex-
ample. It was unfair to Kipling, who knew wonder-
fully, for so homeless a man what the love of home
can mean. But the lines, in isolation, can be taken
to sum up the thing. They run:
If England was what England seems
'Ow quick we'd drop 'er. But she ain't!
Love never spoke that way. It is like loving your chil-
dren only "if they're good/' your wife only while she
keeps her looks, your husband only so long as he is
famous and successful. "No man," said one of the
Greeks, "loves his city because it is great, but because
it is his," A man who really loves his country will love
her in her ruin and degeneration "England, with
all thy faults, I love thee still." She will be to him "a
poor thing but mine own." He may think her good
and great, when she is not, because he loves her; the
delusion is up to a point pardonable. But Kipling's
soldier reverses it; he loves her because he thinks her
146}
Likings and Laves for the Sub-Human
good and great loves her on her merits. She is a fine
going concern and it gratifies Ms pride to be in it.
How if she ceased to be such? The answer is plainly
given:" 'Ow quick we'd drop 'er." When the ship be-
gins to sink he will leave her. Thus that kind of pa-
triotism which sets off with the greatest swagger of
drums and banners actually sets oS on the road that
can lead to Vichy. And this is a phenomenon which
will meet us again. When the natural loves become
lawless they do not merely do harm to other loves;
they themselves cease to be the loves they were to
be loves at all.
Patriotism has, then, many faces. Those who would
reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what
will certainly step has already begun to step into
its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever,
nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow
nerve their subjects to defend them or at least to pre-
pare for their defence. Where the sentiment of patri-
otism has been destroyed this can be done only by
presenting every international conflict in a purely
ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor
blood for "their country" they must be made to feel
that they are spending them for justice, or civilisa-
tion, or humanity. This is a step down, not up.
Patriotic sentiment did not of course need to disregard
ethics. Good men needed to be convinced that their
country's cause was just; but it was still their
country's cause, not the cause of justice as such. The
C47}
THE FOUR LOVES
difference seems to me important. I may without self-
righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend myhouse by force against a burglar; but if I start pretend-
ing that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds
wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in ques-
tion was mine I become insufferable. The pretence
that when England's cause is just we are on
England's side as some neutral Don Quixote mightbe for that reason alone, is equally spurious. Andnonsense draws evil after it. If our country's cause is
the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation.
A false transcendence is given to things which are
veiy much of this world.
The glory of the old sentiment was that while it
could steel men to the utmost endeavour, it still knew
itself to be a sentiment. Wars could be heroic without
pretending to be Holy Wars. The hero's death was not
confused with the martyr's. And (delightfully) the
same sentiment which could be so serious in a rear-
guard action could also in peacetime take itself as
lightly as all happy loves often do. It could laugh at
itself. Our older patriotic songs cannot be sung with-
out a twinkle in the eye; later ones sound more like
hymns. Give me "The British Grenadiers" (with
a tow-row-row-row} any day rather than "Land of
Hope and Glory."
It will be noticed that the sort of love I have been
describing, and all its ingredients, can be for some-
thing other than a country: for a school, a regi-
C 4 8 ]
Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human
ment, a great family, or a class. All the same
criticisms will still apply. It can also be felt for bodies
that claim more than a natural affection: for a
Church or (alas) a party in a Church, or for a re-
ligious order. This terrible subject would require a
book to itself. Here it will be enough to say that the
Heavenly Society is also an earthly society. Our
(merely natural) patriotism towards the latter can
very easily borrow the transcendent claims of the
former and use them to justify the most abominable
actions. If ever the book which I am not going to
write is written it must be the full confession byChristendom of Christendom's specific contribution
to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Largeareas of "the World" will not hear us till we have pub-
licly disowned much of our past. Why should they?
We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the
service of Moloch.
It may be thought that I should not end this chap-
ter without a word about our love for animals. But
that will fit in better in the next. Whether animals
are in fact sub-personal or not, they are never loved
as if they were. The fact or the illusion of personality
is always present, so that love for them is really an
instance of that Affection which is the subject of the
following chapter.
149}
CHAP TER III
AFFECTION
I begin with
the humblest and most widely diffused of loves, the
love in which our experience seems to differ least
from that of the animals. Let me add at once that I
do not on that account give it a lower value. Nothingin Man is either worse or better for being shared with
the beasts. When we blame a man for being "a mere
animal/' we mean not that he displays animal char-
acteristics (we all do) but that he displays these, and
only these, on occasions where the specifically hu-
man was demanded. (When we call him "brutal" we
usually mean that he commits cruelties impossible to
most real brutes; they're not clever enough.)
The Greeks called this love storge (two syllables
and the g is "hard"). I shall here call it simply Affec-
tion. My Greek Lexicon defines storge as "affection,
especially of parents to offspring"; but also of off-
spring to parents. And that, I have no doubt, is the
original form of the thing as well as the central mean-
ing of the word. The image we must start with is that
of a mother nursing a baby, a bitch or a cat with a
basketful of puppies or kittens; all in a squeaking,
t53}
THE FOUR LOVES
nuzzling heap together; punings, lickings, baby-talk,
milk, warmth, the smell of young life.
The importance of this image is that it presents us
at the very outset with a certain paradox. The Need
and Need-love of the young is obvious; so is the Gift-
love of the mother. She gives birth, gives suck, gives
protection. On the other hand, she must give birth or
die. She must give suck or suffer. That way, her Affec-
tion too is a Need-love. There is the paradox. It is a
Need-love but what it needs is to give. It is a Gift-love
but it needs to be needed. We shall have to return to
this point.
But even in animal life, and still more in our own,
Affection extends far beyond the relation of mother
and young. This warm comfortableness, this satisfac-
tion in being together, takes in all sorts of objects. It
is indeed the least discriminating of loves. There are
women for whom we can predict few wooers and men
who are likely to have few friends. They have nothing
to offer. But almost anyone can become an object of
Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating.
There need be no apparent fitness between those
whom it unites. I have seen it felt for an imbecile not
only by his parents but by his brothers. It ignores the
barriers of age, sex, class and education. It can exist
between a clever young man from the university and
an old nurse, though their minds inhabit different
worlds. It ignores even the barriers of species. We
C54}
AFFECTION
see it not only between dog and man but, more sur-
prisingly, between dog and cat. Gilbert WMte claims
to have discovered it between a horse and a hen.
Some of the novelists have seized this well. In
Tristram Shandy "my father" and Uncle Toby are so
far from being united by any community of interests
or ideas that they cannot converse for ten minutes
without cross-purposes; but we are made to feel their
deep mutual affection. So with Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza, Pickwick and Sam Weller, Dick Swivel-
ler and the Marchioness. So too, though probably
without the author's conscious intention, in The Wind
in the Willows; the quaternion of Mole, Rat, Badger,
and Toad suggests the amazing heterogeneity pos-
sible between those who are bound by Affection.
But Affection has its own criteria. Its objects have
to be familiar. We can sometimes point to the very
day and hour when we fell in love or began a new
friendship. I doubt if we ever catch Affection begin-
ning. To become aware of it is to become aware that
it has already been going on for some time. The use
of "old" or vieux as a term of Affection is significant.
The dog barks at strangers who have never done it
any harm and wags its tail for old acquaintances
even if they never did it a good turn. The child will
love a crusty old gardener who has hardly ever taken
any notice of it and shrink from the visitor who is
making every attempt to win its regard. But it must
{55]
THE FOUR LOVES
be an old gardener, one who has "always" been there
the short but seemingly immemorial "always" of
childhood.
Affection, as I have said, is the humblest love. It
gives itself no airs. People can be proud of being "in
love," or of friendship. Affection is modest even
furtive and shame-faced. Once when I had remarked
on the affection quite often found between cat and
dog, my friend replied, "Yes. But I bet no dog would
ever confess it to the other dogs." That is at least
a good caricature of much human Affection. "Let
homely faces stay at home," says Comus. Now Affec-
tion has a very homely face. So have many of those
for whom we feel it. It is no proof of our refine-
ment or perceptiveness that we love them; nor that
they love us. What I have called Appreciative love
is no basic element in Affection. It usually needs ab-
sence or bereavement to set us praising those to whom
only Affection binds UK*We take them for granted:
and this taking for granted, which is an outrage in
erotic love, is here right and proper up to a point.
It fits the comfortable, quiet nature of the feeling.
Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and
frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like
getting your household furniture out for a move. It
did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or
tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine. Affection almost
slinks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble,
un-dress, private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old
{56}
AFFECTION
jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog's tail on the kitchen
floor, the sound of a sewing-machine, a gollywog
left on the lawn.
But I must at once correct myself. I am talking of
Affection as it is when it exists apart from the other
loves. It often does so exist; often not. As gin is not
only a drink in itself but also a base for many mixed
drinks, solAffection, besides being a love itself, can
enter into the other loves and colour them all through
and become the very medium in which from day to
day they operate.^They would not perhaps wear very
well without it. To make a friend is not the same as
to become affectionate. But when your friend has be-
come an old friend, all those things about him whict
had originally nothing to do with the friendship be-
come familiar and dear with familiarity. As for erotic
love, I can imagine nothing more disagreeable than
to experience it for more than a very short time with-
out this homespun clothing of affection. That would
be a most uneasy condition, either too angelic or too
animal or each by turn; never quite great enough or
little enough for man. There is indeed a peculiar
charm, both in friendship and in Eros, about those
moments when Appreciative love lies, as it were,
curled up asleep, and the mere ease and ordinariness
of the relationship (free as solitude, yet neither is
alone) wraps us round. No need to talk. No need
to make love. No needs at all except perhaps to stir
the fire.
157]
THE FOUR LOVES
This blending and overlapping of the loves is well
kept before us by the fact that at most times
and places all three of them had in common, as their
expression, the kiss. In modern England friendship
no longer uses it, but Affection and Eros do. It be-
longs so fully to both that we cannot now tell which
borrowed it from the other or whether there were bor-
rowing at all. To be sure, you may say that the kiss
of Affection differs from the kiss of Eros. Yes; but not
all kisses between lovers are lovers' kisses. Again,
both these loves tend and it embarrasses many mod-
ems to use a "little language" or "baby talk." Andthis is not peculiar to the human species. Professor
Lorenz has told us that when jackdaws are amorous
their calls "consist chiefly of infantile sounds reserved
by adult jackdaws for these occasions" (King
Solomon's Ring, p. 158). We and the birds have the
same excuse. Different sorts of tenderness are both
tenderness and the language of the earliest tenderness
we have ever known is recalled to do duty for the new
sort.
One of the most remarkable by-products of Affec-
tion has not yet been mentioned. I have said that
is not primarily an Appreciative love. It is not dis-
criminating. It can "rub along" with the most un-
promising people. Yet oddly enough this very fact
means that it can in the end make appreciations pos-
sible which, but for it, might never have existed. We
may say, and not quite untruly, that we have chosen
{58]
AFFECTION
our friends and the woman we love for their various
excellences for beauty, frankness, goodness of
heart, wit, intelligence, or what not. But it had to be
the particular kind of wit, the particular kind of
beauty, the particular kind of goodness that we like,
and we have our personal tastes in these matters. That
is why friends and lovers feel that they were "made
for one another." The especial glory of Affection is
that it can unite those who most emphatically, even
comically, are not; people who, if they had not found
themselves put down by fate in the same household or
community, would have had nothing to do with each
other. If Affection grows out of this of course it
often does not their eyes begin to open. Growingfond of "old so-and-so," at first simply because he
happens to be there, I presently begin to see that there
is "something in him" after all. The moment when
one first says, really meaning it, that though he is not
"my sort of man" he is a very good man "in his own
way" is one of liberation. It does not feel like that; we
may feel only tolerant and indulgent. But really we
have crossed a frontier. That "in his own way"means that we are getting beyond our own idiosyn-
crasies, that we are learning to appreciate goodness
or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or
intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own pal-
ate.
"* "Dogs and cats should always be brought up to-
gether," said someone, "it broadens their minds so."
{59}
THE FOUR LOVES
Affection broadens ours; of all natural loves it is the
most catholic, the least finical, the broadest. The peo-
ple with whom you are thrown together in the family,
the college, the mess, the ship, the religious house,
are from this point of view a wider circle than the
friends, however numerous, whom you have made for
yourself in the outer world. By having a great manyfriends I do not prove that I have a wide appreciation
of human excellence. You might as well say I prove
the width of my literary taste by being able to enjoy
all the books in my own study. The answer is the same
in both cases "You chose those books. You chose
those friends. Of course they suit you." The truly
wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to
find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray
outside any secondhand bookshop. The truly wide
taste in humanity will similarly find something to ap-
preciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one
has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection
that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then
to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally
to appreciate, the people who "happen to be there."
Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves,
odder than you could have believed and worth far
more than we guessed.
And now we are drawing near the point of danger.
Affection, I have said, gives itself no airs; charity,
said St. Paul, is not puffed up. Affection can love the
unattractive: God and His saints love the unlovable.
C60]
AFFECTION
Affection "does not expect too much/' turns a blind
eye to faults, revives easily after quarrels; just so
charity suffers long and is kind and forgives. Affection
opens our eyes to goodness we could not have seen,
or should not have appreciated without it. So does
humble sanctity. If we dwelled exclusively on these
resemblances we might be led on to believe that this
Affection is not simply one of the natural loves but
is Love Himself working in our human hearts and
fulfilling the law. Were the Victorian novelists right
after all? Is love (of this sort) really enough? Are the
"domestic affections," when in their best and fullest
development, the same thing as the Christian life?
The answer to all these questions, I submit, is
certainly No.
I do not mean simply that those novelists some-
times wrote as if they had never heard the text about
"hating" wife and mother and one's own life also.
That of course is true. The rivaky between all natural
loves and the love of God is something a Christian
dare not forget.- jGod is the great Rival, the ultimate
object of human jealousy; that beauty, terrible as
the Gorgon's, which may at any moment steal from
me or it seems like stealing to me my wife's or
husband's or daughter's heart. The bitterness of
some unbelief, though disguised even from those who
feel it as anti-clericalism or hatred of superstition, is
really due to this. But I am not at present thinking of
that rivalry; we shall have to face it in a later chapter.
161}
THE FOUR LOVES
For the moment our business is more down to earth.
How many of these "happy homes" really exist?
Worse still; are all the unhappy ones unhappy be-
cause Affection is absent? I believe not. It can be
present, causing the unhappiness. Nearly all the
characteristics of this love are ambivalent. They maywork for ill as well as for good. By itself, left simply to
follow its own bent, it can darken and degrade human
life. The debunkers and anti-sentimentalists have not
said all the truth about it, but all they have said is
true.
Symptomatic of this, perhaps, is the odiousness of
nearly all those treacly tunes and saccharine poemsin which popular art expresses Affection. They are
odious because of their falsity. They represent as a
ready-made recipe for bliss (and even for goodness)
what is in fact only an opportunity. There is no hint
that we shall have to do anything: only let Affection
pour over us like a warm shower-bath and all, it is
implied, will be well.
Affection, we have seen, includes both Need-love
and Gift-love. I begin with the Need our craving
for the Affection of others.
Now there is a clear reason why this craving, of all
love-cravings, easily becomes the most unreasonable.
I have said that almost anyone may be the object of
Affection. Yes; and almost everyone expects to be.
The egregious Mr. Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh
is outraged to discover that his son does not love him;
C62}
AFFECTIONIt is "unnatural
5'
for a boy not to love Ms own father.
It never occurs to Mm to ask whether, since the first
day the boy can remember, he has ever done or said
anything that could excite love. Similarly, at the be-
ginning of King Lear the hero is shown as a very un-
lovable old man devoured with a ravenous appetitefor Affection. I am driven to literary examples be-
cause you, the reader, and I do not live in the same
neighbourhood; if we did, there would unfortu-
nately be no difficulty about replacing them with ex-
amples from real life. The thing happens every day.And we can see why. We all know that we must do
something, if not to merit, at least to attract, erotic
love or friendsMp. But Affection is often assumed to
be provided, ready made., by nature; "built-in,"
"laid-on," "on the house.95 We have a right to expect
it. If the others do not give it, they are "unnatural."
TMs assumption is no doubt the distortion of a
truth. Much has been "built-in." Because we are a
mammalian species, instinct will provide at least
some degree, often a Mgh one, of maternal love. Be-
cause we are a social species familiar association pro-vides a milieu in wMch, if all goes well, Affection
will arise and grow strong without demanding any
very sMning qualities in its objects. If it is given us
it will not necessarily be given us on our merits; we
may get it with very little trouble. From a dim per-
ception of the truth (many are loved with Affection
far beyond their deserts) Mr. Pontifex draws the
63}
THE FOUR LOVES
ludicrous conclusion, "Therefore I, without desert,
have a right to it." It is as if, on a far higher plane, we
argued that because no man by merit has a right to
the Grace of God, I, having no merit, am entitled to
it. There is no question of rights in either case. What
we have is not "a right to expect" but a "reasonable
expectation" of being loved by our intimates if we,
and they, are more or less ordinary people. But we
may not be. We may be intolerable. If we are, "na-
ture" will work against us. For the very same condi-
tions of intimacy which make Affection possible also
and no less naturally make possible a peculiarly
incurable distaste; a hatred as immemorial, constant,
unemphatic, almost at times unconscious, as the cor-
responding form of love. Siegfried, in the opera,
could not remember a time before every shuffle, mut-
ter, and fidget of his dwarfish foster-father had be-
come odious. We never catch this kind of hatred,
any more than Affection, at the moment of its be-
ginning. It was always there before. Notice that old
is a term of wearied loathing as well as of endear-
ment: "at his old tricks," "in his old way," "the same
old thing."
It would be absurd to say that Lear is lacking in
Affection. In so far as Affection, is Need-love he is
half-crazy with it. Unless, in his own way, he loved
his daughters he would not so desperately desire their
love. The most unlovable parent (or child) may be
full of such ravenous love. But it works to their own
t 6 4 }
AFFECTION
misery and everyone else's. The situation becomes
suffocating. If people are already unlovable a con-
tinual demand on their part (as of right) to be
loved their manifest sense of injury, their re-
proaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely im-
plicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pity
produce in us a sense of guilt (they are intended
to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided
and cannot cease to commit. They seal up the veryfountain for which they are thirsty. If ever, at some
favoured moment, any germ of Affection for them
stirs in us, their demand for more and still more petri-
fies us again. And of course such people always de-
sire the same proof of our love; we are to join their
side, to hear and share their grievance against some-one else. If my boy really loved me he would see howselfish Ms father is ... if my brother loved me he
would make a party with me against my sister
if you loved me you wouldn't let me be treated like
this . . .
And all the while they remain unaware of the real
road. "If you would be loved, be lovable," said Ovid.
That cheery old reprobate only meant, "If you want
to attract the girls you must be attractive," but his
maxim has a wider application. The amorist was
wiser in his generation than Mr. Pontifex and KingLear.
The really surprising thing is not that these
insatiable demands made by the unlovable are some-
65}
THE FOUR LOVES
times made in vain, but that they are so often met.
Sometimes one sees a woman's girlhood, youth and
long years of her maturity up to the verge of old age
all spent in tending, obeying, caressing, and perhaps
supporting, a maternal vampire who can never be
caressed and obeyed enough. The sacrifice
but there are two opinions about that may be beau-
tiful; the old woman who exacts it is not.
The "built-in" or unmerited character of Affection
thus invites a hideous misinterpretation. So does its
ease and informality.
We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris-
ing generation. I am an oldster myself and might be
expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have
been far more impressed by the bad manners of par-
ents to children than by those of children to parents.
Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family
meals where the father or mother treated their
grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered
to any other young people, would simply have termi-
nated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on mat-
ters which the children understand and their elders
don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions,
ridicule of things the young take seriously some-
times of their religion insulting references to their
friends, all provide an easy answer to the question
"Why are they always out? Why do they like every
house better than their home?" Who does not prefer
civility to barbarism?
{66}
AFFECTION
If you asked any of these insufferable people
they are not all parents of course why they behaved
that way at home, they would reply, "Oh, hang it
all, one comes home to relax. A chap can't be always
on Ms best behaviour. If a man can't be himself in
his own house, where can he? Of course we don't
want Company Manners at home. We're a happy
family. We can say anything to one another here. Noone minds. We all understand."
Once again it is so nearly true yet so fatally wrong.
Affection is an affair of old clothes, and ease, of the
unguarded moment, of liberties which would be ill-
bred if we took them with strangers. But old clothes
are one thing; to wear the same shirt till it stank
would be another. There are proper clothes for a gar-
den party; but the clothes for home must be proper
too, in their own different way. Similarly there is a
distinction between public and domestic courtesy.
The root principle of both is the same: "that no one
give any kind of preference to himself." But the more
public the occasion, the more our obedience to this
principle has been "taped" or formalised. There are
"rules" of good manners. The more intimate the oc-
casion, the less the formalisation; but not therefore
the less need of courtesy. On the contrary, Affection
at its best practises a courtesy which is incom-
parably more subtle, sensitive, and deep than the
public kind. In public a ritual would do. At home
you must have the reality which that ritual rep-
67)
THE FOUR LOVES
resented, or else the deafening triumphs of the great-
est egoist present. You must really give no kind of
preference to yourself; at a party it is enough to con-
ceal the preference. Hence the old proverb "come live
with me and you'll know me." Hence a man's famil-
iar manners first reveal the true value of his (signif-
icantly odious phrase!) "Company" or "Party" man-
ners. Those who leave their manners behind them
when they come home from the dance or the sherry
party have no real courtesy even there. They were
merely aping those who had.
"We can say anything to one another." The truth
behind this is that Affection at its best can say what-
ever Affection at its best wishes to say, regardless of
the rules that govern public courtesy; for Affection
at its best wishes neither to wound nor to humiliate
nor to domineer. You may address the wife of yourbosom as "Pig!" when she has inadvertently drunk
your cocktail as well as her own. You may roar down
the story which your father is telling once too often.
You may tease and hoax and banter. You can say
"Shut up. I want to read." You can do anything in
the right tone and at the right moment the tone
and moment which are not intended to, and will not,
hurt. The better the Affection the more unerringly it
knows which these are (every love has its art of love) .
But the domestic Rudesby means something quite
different when he claims liberty to say "anything."
Having a very imperfect sort of Affection himself, or
{68}
AFFECTION
perhaps at that moment none, he arrogates to himself
the beautiful liberties which only the fullest Affection
has a right to or knows how to manage. He then uses
them spitefully in obedience to his resentments; or
ruthlessly in obedience to his egoism; or at best
stupidly, lacking the art. And aH the tame he mayhave a clear conscience. He knows that Affection
takes liberties. He is taking liberties. Therefore (he
concludes) he is being affectionate. Resent anything
and he will say that the defect of love is on your side.
He is hurt. He has been misunderstood.
He then sometimes avenges himself by getting on
his high horse and becoming elaborately "polite."
The implication is of course, "Oh! So we are not to
be intimate? We are to behave like mere ac-
quaintances? I had hoped but no matter. Have
it your own way." This illustrates prettily the differ-
ence between intimate and formal courtesy. Precisely
what suits the one may be a breach of the other. Tobe free and easy when you are presented to some
eminent stranger is bad manners; to practice formal
and ceremonial courtesies at home ("public faces
in private places") is and is always intended to be
bad manners. There is a delicious illustration of
really good domestic manners in Tristram Shandy.
At a singularly unsuitable moment Uncle Toby has
been holding forth on his favourite theme of fortifica-
tion. "My Father," driven for once beyond en-
durance, violently interrupts. Then he sees his
C691
THE FOUR LOVES
brother's face; the utterly unretaliating face of Toby,
deeply wounded, not by the slight to himself he
would never think of that but by the slight to the
noble art. My Father at once repents. There is an apol-
ogy, a total reconciliation. Uncle Toby, to show how
complete is Ms forgiveness, to show that he is not on
his dignity, resumes the lecture on fortification.
But we have not yet touched on jealousy. I sup-
pose no one now believes that jealousy is especially
connected with erotic love. If anyone does, the be-
haviour of children, employees, and domestic ani-
mals ought soon to undeceive him. Every kind of
love, almost every kind of association, is liable to
it. The jealousy of Affection is closely connected with
its reliance on what is old and familiar. So also with
the total, or relative, unimportance for Affection of
what I call Appreciative love. We don't want the
"old, familiar faces" to become brighter or more
beautiful, the old ways to be changed even for the bet-
ter, the old jokes and interests to be replaced by ex-
citing novelties. Change is a threat to Affection.
A brother and sister, or two brothers for sex here
is not at work grow to a certain age sharing every-
thing. They have read the same comics, climbed the
same trees, been pirates or spacemen together, taken
up and abandoned stamp-collecting at the same mo-
ment. Then a dreadful thing happens. One of them
flashes ahead discovers poetry or science or serious
music or perhaps undergoes a religious conversion.
70}
AFFECTION
His life is flooded with the new interest. The other
cannot share it; he is left behind. I doubt whether
even the infidelity of a wife or husband raises a more
miserable sense of desertion or a fiercer jealousy than
this can sometimes do. It is not yet jealousy of the
new friends whom the deserter will soon be making.
That will come; at first it is jealousy of the thing it-
self of this science, this music, of God (always
called "religion" or "all this religion" in such con-
texts). The jealousy will probably be expressed byridicule. The new interest is "all siEy nonsense," con-
temptibly childish (or contemptibly grown-up), or
else the deserter is not really interested in it at all
he's showing off, swanking; it's all affectation. Pres-
ently the books will be hidden, the scientific specimens
destroyed, the radio forcibly switched off the classical
programmes. For Affection is the most instinctive,
in that sense the most animal, of the loves; its jeal-
ousy is proportionately fierce. It snarls and bares its
teeth like a dog whose food has been snatched away.
And why would it not? Something or someone has
snatched away from the child I am picturing his life-
long food, his second self. His world is in ruins.
But it is not only children who react thus. Few
things in the ordinary peacetime life of a civilised
country are more nearly fiendish than the rancour
with which a whole unbelieving family will turn on
the one member of it who has become a Christian, or
a whole lowbrow family on the one who shows signs
{71}
THE FOUR LOVES
of becoming an intellectual. This is not, as I once
thought, simply the innate and, as it were, dis-
interested hatred of darkness for light. A church-
going family in which one has gone atheist will not
always behave any better. It is the reaction to a deser-
tion, even to robbery. Someone or something has
stolen "our" boy (or girl). He who was one of Us has
become one of Them. What right had anybody to do
it? He is ours. But once change has thus begun,
who knows where it will end? (And we all so happyand comfortable before and doing no harm to no
one!)
Sometimes a curious double jealousy is felt, or
rather two inconsistent jealousies which chase each
other round in the sufferer's mind. On the one hand
"This" is "All nonsense, all bloody high-brow non-
sense, all canting humbug." But on the other, "Sup-
posing it can't be, it mustn't be, but just supposing
there were something in it?" Supposing there really
were anything in literature, or in Christianity? Howif the deserter has really entered a new world which
the rest of us never suspected? But, if so, how un-
fair! Why him? Why was it never opened to us?
"A chit of a girl a whipper-snapper of a boy being
shown things that are hidden from their elders?" Andsince that is clearly incredible and unendurable,
jealousy returns to the hypothesis "All nonsense."
Parents in this state are much more comfortably
placed than brothers and sisters. Their past is un-
172}
AFFECTION
known to their children. Whatever the desertefs
new world is, they can always claim that they have
been through it themselves and come out the other
end. "It's a phase," they say. "It'll blow over." Noth-
ing could be more satisfactory. It cannot be there and
then refuted, for it is a statement about the future. It
stings, yet so indulgently said is hard to resent.
Better still, the elders may really believe it. Best of
all, it may finally turn out to have been true. It won't
be their fault if it doesn't.
"Boy, boy, these wild courses of yours will break
your mother's heart." That eminently Victorian ap-
peal may often have been true. Affection was bitterly
wounded when one member of the family fell from
the homely ethos into something worse gambling,
drink, keeping an opera girl. Unfortunately it is al-
most equally possible to break your mother's heart
by rising above the homely ethos. The conservative
tenacity of Affection works both ways. It can be a
domestic counterpart to that nationally suicidal type
of education which keeps back the promising child
because the idlers and dunces might be "hurt" if it
were undemocratically moved into a higher class than
themselves.
All these perversions of Affection are mainly con-
nected with Affection as a Need-love. But Affection
as a Gift-love has its perversions% too.
I am thinking of Mrs. Fidget, who died a few
months ago. It is really astonishing how her family
{73]
THE FOUR LOVES
have brightened up. The drawn look has gone from
her husband's face; he begins to be able to laugh.
The younger boy, whom I had always thought an
embittered, peevish little creature, turns out to be
quite human. The elder, who was hardly ever at
home except when he was in bed, is nearly always
there now and has begun to reorganise the garden.
The girl,who was always supposed to be "delicate"
(though I never found out what exactly the trouble
was), now has the riding lessons which were once
out of the question, dances all night, and plays any
amount of tennis. Even the dog who was never al-
lowed out except on a lead is now a well-known
member of the Lamp-post Club in their road.
Mrs. Fidget very often said that she lived for her
family. And it was not untrue. Everyone in the neigh-
bourhood knew it. "She lives for her family," they
said; "what a wife and mother!" She did all the wash-
ing; true, she did it badly, and they could have af-
forded to send it out to a laundry, and they frequently
begged her not to do it. But she did. There was al-
ways a hot lunch for anyone who was at home and
always a hot meal at night (even in midsummer).
They implored her not to provide this. They protested
almost with tears in their eyes (and with truth) that
they liked cold meals. It made no difference. She
was living for her family. She always sat up to "wel-
come" you home if you were out late at night; two
or three in the morning, it made no odds; you would
174}
AFFECTION
always find the frail, pale, weary face awaiting you,
like a silent accusation. Which meant of course that
you couldn't with, any decency go out very often.
She was always making things too; being in her own
estimation (I'm no judge myself) an excellent ama-
teur dressmaker and a great knitter. And of course,
unless you were a heartless brute, you had to wear
the things. (The Vicar tells me that, since her death,
the contributions of that family alone to "sales of
work" outweigh those of all his other parishioners
put together. ) And then her care for their health! She
bore the whole burden of that daughter's "delicacy"
alone. The Doctor an old friend, and it was not be-
ing done on National Health was never allowed to
discuss matters with his patient. After the briefest
examination of her, he was taken into another room
by the mother. The girl was to have no worries, no
responsibility for her own health. Only loving care;
caresses, special foods, horrible tonic wines, and
breakfast in bed. For Mrs. Fidget, as she so often
said, would "work her fingers to the bone" for her
family. They couldn't stop her. Nor could they
being decent people quite sit still and watch her
do it. They had to help. Indeed they were always hav-
ing to help. That is, they did things for her to help
her to do things for them which they didn't want
done. As for the dear dog, it was to her, she said,
"Just like one of the children." It was in fact, as like
one of them as she could make it. But since it had no
75}
THE FOUR LOVES
scruples it got on rather better than they, and though
vetted, dieted and guarded within an inch of its
life, contrived sometimes to reach the dustbin or the
dog next door.
The Vicar says Mrs. Fidget is now at rest. Let us
hope she is. What's quite certain is that her family
are.
It is easy to see how liability to this state is, so to
speak, congenital in the maternal instinct. This, as
we saw, is a Gift-love, but one that needs to give;
therefore needs to be needed. But the proper aim of
giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no
longer needs our gift.We feed children in order that
they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach
them in order that they may soon not need our teach-
ing. Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-love.
It must work towards its own abdication. We must
aim at making ourselves superfluous. The hour when
we can say "They need me no longer" should be our
reward. But the instinct, simply in its own nature,
has no power to fulfil this law. The instinct desires
the good of its object, but not simply; only the good
it can itself give. A much higher love a love which
desires the good of the object as such, from whatever
source that good comes must step in and help or
tame the instinct before it can make the abdication.
And of course it often does. But where it does not,
the ravenous need to be needed will gratify itself
either by keeping its objects needy or by inventing
C76}
AFFECTION
for them imaginary needs. It will do this all the more
ruthlessly because it thinks (in one sense truly) that
it is a Gift-love and therefore regards itself as "un-
selfish."
It is not only mothers who can do this. All those
other Affections which, whether by derivation from
parental instinct or by similarity of function, need to
be needed may fall into the same pit. The Affection
of patron for protege is one. In Jane Austen's novel,
Emma intends that Harriet Smith should have a
happy life; but only the sort of happy life which
Emma herself has planned for her. My own profes-
sion that of a university teacher is in this way
dangerous. If we are any good we must always be
working towards the moment at which our pupils
are fit to become our critics and rivals. We should
be delighted when it arrives, as the fencing master
is delighted when his pupil can pink and disarm him.
And many are.
But not all. I am old enough to remember the sad
case of Dr. Quartz. No university boasted a more
effective or devoted teacher. He spent the whole of
himself on his pupils. He made an indelible impres-
sion on nearly all of them. He was the object of much
well merited hero-worship. Naturally, and delight-
fully, they continued to visit him after the tutorial
relation had ended went round to his house of an
evening and had famous discussions. But the curious
thing is that this never lasted. Sooner or later it
[77}
THE FOUR LOVES
might be within a few months or even a few weeks
came the fatal evening when they knocked on his
door and were told that the Doctor was engaged.
After that he would always be engaged. They were
banished from him forever. This was because, at
their last meeting, they had rebelled. They had as-
serted their independence differed from the master
and supported their own view, perhaps not without
success. Faced with that very independence which
he had laboured to produce and which it was his duty
to produce if he could, Dr. Quartz could not bear it.
Wotan had toiled to create the free Siegfried; pre-
sented with the free Siegfried, he was enraged. Dr.
Quartz was an unhappy man.
This terrible need to be needed often finds its out-
let in pampering an animal. To learn that someone
is "fond of animals" tells us very little until we know
in what way. For there are two ways. On the one
hand the higher and domesticated animal is, so to
speak, a "bridge" between us and the rest of nature.
We all at times feel somewhat painfully our human
isolation from the sub-human world the atrophy
of instinct which our intelligence entails, our exces-
sive self-consciousness, the innumerable complexities
of our situation, our inability to live in the present
If only we could shuffle it all off! We must not
and incidentally we can't become beasts. But we
can be with a beast. It is personal enough to give the
word with a real meaning; yet it remains very largely
{78}
AFFECTION
an unconscious little bundle of biological impulses,
It has three legs in nature's world and one in ours.
It is a link, an ambassador. Who would not wish, as
Bosanquet put it, "to have a representative at the
court of Pan"? Man with dog closes a gap in the
universe. But of course animals are often used in a
worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your
family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is
the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in
need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile,
reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from
all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for
this by creating needs for countless little indulgences
which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature
thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household;
it acts as a sump or drain you are too busy spoiling
a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this
purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of
all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure,
it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably
it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it.
Better still, you would never know if it did. The most
down-trodden human, driven too far, may one dayturn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't
speak.
Those who say "The more I see of men the better
I like dogs" those who find in animals a relief from
the demands of human companionship will be well
advised to examine their real reasons.
{79}
THE FOUR LOVES
I hope I am not being misunderstood. If this chap-
ter leads anyone to doubt that the lack of "natural
affection" is an extreme depravity I shall have failed.
Nor do I question for a moment that Affection is
responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and
durable happiness there is in our natural lives. I
shall therefore have some sympathy with those whose
comment on the last few pages takes the form "Of
course. Of course. These things do happen. Selfish
or neurotic people can twist anything, even love, into
some sort of misery or exploitation.But why stress
these marginal cases? A little common sense, a little
give and take, prevents their occurrence among de-
cent people." But I think this comment itself needs a
commentary.
Firstly, as to neurotic. I do not think we shall see
things more clearly by classifying all these malefical
states of Affection as pathological. No doubt there
are really pathological conditions which make the
temptation to these states abnormally hard or even
impossible to resist for particular people. Send those
people to the doctors by all means. But I believe that
everyone who is honest with himself will admit that
he has felt these temptations. Their occurrence is not
a disease; or if it is, the name of that disease is Being
a Fallen Man. In ordinary people the yielding to
them and who does not sometimes yield? is not
disease, but sin. Spiritual direction will here help us
803
AFFECTION
more than medical treatment. Medicine labours to
restore "natural" structure or "normal" function.
But greed, egoism, self-deception and self-pity are
not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as as-
tigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's
name, would describe as natural or normal the man
from whom these failings were wholly absent?
"Natural," if you like, in a quite different sense;
archnatural, unfailen. We have seen only one such
Man. And He was not at all like the psychologist's
picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, hap-
pily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't
really be very well "adjusted" to your world if it
says you "have a devil" and ends by nailing you upnaked to a stake of wood.
But secondly, the comment in its own language
admits the very thing I am trying to say. Affection
produces happiness if and only if there is common
sense and give and take and "decency." In other
words, only if something more, and other, than Affec-
tion is added. The mere feeling is not enough. You
need "common sense," that is, reason. You need
"give and take"; that is, you need justice, continu-
ally stimulating mere Affection when it fades and
restraining it when it forgets or would defy the art
of love. You need "decency." There is no disguising
the fact that this means goodness; patience, self-de-
nial, humility, and the continual intervention of a
[81}
THE FOUR LOVES
far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can
ever be. That is the whole point. If we try to live by
Affection alone, Affection will "go bad on us."
How bad, I believe we seldom recognise. Can Mrs.
Fidget really have been quite unaware of the count-
less frustrations and miseries she inflicted on her
family? It passes belief. She knew of course she
^new that it spoiled your whole evening to know
that when you came home you would find her use-
lessly, accusingly, "sitting up for you." She continued
all these practices because if she had dropped them
she would have been faced with the fact she was
determined not to see; would have known that she
was not necessary. That is the first motive. Then too,
the very laboriousness of her life silenced her secret
doubts as to the quality of her love. The more her
feet burned and her back ached, the better, for this
pain whispered in her ear "How much I must love
them if I do all this!" That is the second motive. But
I think there is a lower depth. The unappreciative-
ness of the others, those terrible, wounding words
anything will "wound" a Mrs. Fidget in which they
begged her to send the washing out, enabled her to
feel ill-used, therefore, to have a continual grievance,
to enjoy the pleasures of resentment. If anyone says
he does not know those pleasures, he is a liar or a
saint. It is true that they are pleasures only to those
who hate. But then a love like Mrs- Fidget's contains
a good deal of hatredMt was of erotic love that the
{82}
AFFECTION
Roman poet said, "I love and hate," but other kinds
of love admit the same mixture. vThey carry in them
the seeds of hatred/If ASection is made the absolute
sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate.
Love^"*having become a god, becomes a demon.
83}
CHAP TER IV
FRIENDSHIP
WHEN either
Affection or Eros is one's theme, one finds a pre-
pared audience. The importance and beauty of both
have been stressed and almost exaggerated again and
again. Even those who would debunk them are in
conscious reaction against this laudatory tradition
and, to that extent, influenced by it. But very few
modern people think Friendship a love of comparable
value or even a love at all. I cannot remember that
any poem since In Memoriam, or any novel, has cele-
brated it. Tristan and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra,
Romeo and Juliet, have innumerable counterparts in
modern literature: David and Jonathan, Pylades and
Orestes, Roland and Oliver, Amis and Amile, have
not. To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest
and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life
and the school of virtue. The modern world, in com-
parison, ignores it. We admit of course that besides a
wife and family a man needs a few "friends." But
the very tone of the admission, and the sort of ac-
quaintanceships which those who make it would
describe as "friendships," show clearly that what they
C87]
THE FOUR LOVES
are talking about has very little to do with that Philia
which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that
Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book. It is some-
thing quite marginal; not a main course in life's ban-
quet; a diversion; something that fills up the chinks
ot one's time. How has this come about?rThe first and most obvious answer is that few
value it because few experience it. And the possibility
of going through life without the experience is rooted
in that fact which separates Friendship so sharply
from both the other lovesj Friendship is in a sense
not at all derogatory to it the least natural of loves;
the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious
and necessary. It has least commerce with our nerves;
there is nothing throaty about it; nothing that
quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale. It is
essentially between individuals; the moment two menare friends they have in some degree drawn apart
together from the herd. Without Eros none of us
would have been begotten and without Affection
none of us would have been reared; but we can live
and breed without Friendship. The species, biologi-
cally considered, has no need of it. The pack or herd
the community may even dislike and distrust it.
Its leaders very often do. Headmasters and Head-
mistresses and Heads of religious communities, colo-
nels and ships' captains, can feel uneasy when close
and strong friendships arise between little knots of
their subjects.,
188}
FRIENDSHIP
This (so to call it) "non-natural" quality in
Friendship goes far to explain why it was exalted in
ancient and medieval times and has come to be made
light of in our own. The deepest and most permanent
thought of those ages was ascetic and world-renounc-
ing. Nature and emotion and the body were feared as
dangers to our souls, or despised as degradations of
our human status. Inevitably that sort of love was
most prized which seemed most independent, or even
defiant, of mere nature. Affection and Eros were too
obviously connected with our nerves, too obviously
shared with the brutes. You could feel these tugging
at your guts and fluttering in your diaphragm. But
in Friendship in that luminous, tranquil, rational
world of relationships freely chosen you got awayfrom all that: This alone, of all the loves, seemed to
raise you to the level of gods or angels.
But then came Romanticism and "tearful comedy"and the "return to nature" and the exaltation of Sen-
timent; and in their train all that great wallow of
emotion which, though often criticised, has lasted
ever since. Finally, the exaltation of instinct, the
dark gods in the blood; whose hierophants may be
incapable of male friendship. Under this new dis-
pensation all that had once commended this love
now began to work against it. It had not tearful smiles
and keepsakes and baby-talk enough to please the
sentimentalists. There was not blood and guts enoughabout it to attract the primitivists. It looked thin and
{89}
THE FOUR LOVES
etiolated; a sort of vegetarian substitute for the more
organic loves.
Other causes have contributed. To those and
they are now the majority who see human life
merely as a development and complication of animal
life all forms of behaviour which cannot produce cer-
tificates of an animal origin and of survival value are
suspect. Friendship's certificates are not very satis-
factory. Again, that outlook which values the collec-
tive above the individual necessarily disparages
Friendship; it is a relation between men at their high-
est level of individuality. It withdraws men from col-
lective "togetherness" as surely as solitude itself
could do; and more dangerously, for it withdraws
them by two's and three's. Some forms of democratic
sentiment are naturally hostile to it because it is
selective and an affair of the few. To say "These are
my friends" implies "Those are not." For all these
reasons if a man believes (as I do) that the old esti-
mate of Friendship was the correct one, he can hardly
write a chapter on it except as a rehabilitation.
\This imposes on me at the outset a very tiresome
bit of demolition. It has actually become necessary in
our time to rebut the theory that every firm and seri-
ous friendship is really homosexual.
Vrhe dangerous word really is here important. To
say that every Friendship is consciously and explicitly
homosexual would be too obviously false; the wise-
acres take refuge in the less palpable charge that it
{90}
FRIENDSHIP
Is really unconsciously, cryptically, In some Pick-
wickian sense homosexual. And this, though it
cannot be proved, can never of course be refuted.
The fact that no positive evidence of homosexualitycan be discovered In the behaviour of two Friends
does not disconcert the wiseacres at all: "That," they
say gravely, "Is just what we should expect." The
very lack of evidence Is thus treated as evidence; the
absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully
hidden. Yes if it exists at all. But we must first proveIts existence. Otherwise we are arguing like a manwho should say "If there were an invisible cat in that
chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does
look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it."
A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logi-
cally disproved, but it tells us a good deal about those
who hold it. Those who cannot conceive Friendship
as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elabo-
ration of Eros betray the fact that they have never
had a Friend/1The rest of us know that though we
can have erotic love and friendship for the same
person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friend-
ship than a love-afiaimLovers are always talking to
one another about their love; Friends hardly ever
about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to
face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side,
absorbed in some common Interest. Above all, Eros
(while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But
two, far from being the necessary number for Friend-
I91J
THE FOUR LOVES
ship, is not even the best. And the reason for this Is
important.
Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A,
B, and C), A should die, then E loses not only Abut "A's part in C," while C loses not only A but
"A's part in B." In each of my friends there is some-
thing that only some other friend can fully bring out.
By myself I am not large enough to call the whole
man into activity; I want other lights than my own
to show all Ms facets. Now that Charles is dead, I
shall never again see Ronald's reaction to a specifi-
cally Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ron-
ald, having him "to myself" now that Charles is away,
I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the
least jealous of loves. %Vo friends delight to be
joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the
newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. Theycan then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here
comes one who will augment our loves." For in this
love "to divide is not to take away." Of course the
scarcity of kindred souls not to mention practical
considerations about the size of rooms and the audi-
bility of voices set limits to the enlargement of the
circle; but within those limits we possess each friend
not less but more as the number of those with whom
we share him increases. In this, Friendship exhibits
a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself
where the very multitude of the blessed (which no
man can number) increases the fruition which each
FRIENDSHIP
has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own
way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to
all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the
Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy,
Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we
thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more
we shall all have.
The homosexual theory therefore seems to me not
even plausible. This is not to say that Friendship and
abnormal Eros have never been combined. Certain
cultures at certain periods seem to have tended to the
contamination. In war-like societies it was, I think,
especially likely to creep Into the relation between the
mature Brave and his young armour-bearer or squire.
The absence of the women while you were on the
war-path had no doubt something to do with It. In
deciding, If we think we need or can decide, where it
crept in and where it did not, we must surely be
guided by the evidence (when there is any) and not
by an a priori theory. Kisses, tears and embraces are
not in themselves evidence of homosexuality. The
implications would be, if nothing else, too comic.
Hrothgar embracing Beowulf, Johnson embracing
Boswell (a pretty flagrantly heterosexual couple) and
all those hairy old toughs of centurions In Tacitus,
clinging to one another and begging for last kisses
when the legion was broken up ... all pansies? If
you can believe that you can believe anything. On a
broad historical view it is, of course, not the demon-
THE FOUR LOVES
strative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors
but the absence of such gestures in our own society
that calls for some special explanation. We, not they,
are out of step.
I have said that Friendship is the least biological
of our loves. Both the individual and the communitycan survive without it. But there is something else,
often confused with Friendship, which the communitydoes need; something which, though not Friendship,
is the matrix of Friendship.
In early communities the co-operation of the males
as hunters or fighters was no less necessary than the
begetting and rearing of children. A tribe where
there was no taste for the one would die no less surely
than a tribe where there was no taste for the other.
Long before history began we men have got together
apart from the women and done things. We had to.
And to like doing what must be done is a character-
istic that has survival value. We not only had to do
the things, we had to talk about them. We had to
plan the hunt and the battle. When they were over
we had to hold a post mortem and draw conclusions
for future use. We liked this even better. We ridiculed
or punished the cowards and bunglers, we praised
the star-performers. We revelled in technicalities.
("He might have known he'd never get near the
brute, not with the wind that way" . . . "You see,
I had a lighter arrowhead; that's what did it" . . .
"What I always say is"
. . . "stuck him just
94}
FRIENDSHIP
like that, see? Just the way I'm holding this
stick" . . .) In fact, we talked shop. We enjoyedone another's society greatly: we Braves, we hunters,
all bound together by shared skill., shared dangersand hardships, esoteric jokes away from the
women and children. As some wag has said, palaeo-
lithic man may or may not have had a club on his
shoulder but he certainly had a club of the other sort.
It was probably part of his religion; like that sacred
smoking-club where the savages in Melville's Typee
were "famously snug" every evening of their lives.
What were the women doing meanwhile? Howshould I know? I am a man and never spied on the
mysteries of the Bona Dea. They certainly often had
rituals from which men were excluded. When, as
sometimes happened, agriculture was in their hands,
they must, like the men, have had common skills,
toils and triumphs. Yet perhaps their world was
never as emphatically feminine as that of their men-
folk was masculine. The children were with them;
perhaps the old men were there too. But I am only
guessing. I can trace the pre-hlstory of Friendship
only in the male line.
This pleasure in co-operation, in talking shop, in
the mutual respect and understanding of men who
daily see one another tested, is biologically valuable.
You may, if you like, regard it as a product of the
"gregarious instinct." To me that seems a round-
about way of getting at something which we all un-
{95}
THE FOUR LOVES
derstand far better already than anyone has ever
understood the word instinct something which is
going on at this moment in dozens of ward-rooms,
bar-rooms, common-rooms, messes and golf-clubs.
I prefer to call it Companionship or QubbaWe-.
ness.,
/This Companionship is, however, only the matrix
or Friendship. It is often called Friendship, and many
people when they speak of their "friends" mean only
their companions. But it is not Friendship in the
sense I give to the word. By saying this I do not at all
intend to disparage the merely Clubbable relation.
We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from
gold.
Friendship arises out of mere Companionshipwhen two or more of the companions discover that
they have in common some insight or interest or even
taste which the others do not share and which, till that
moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure
(or burden). )frhe typical expression of opening
Friendship would be something like, "What? Youtoo? I thought I was the only one." We can imaginethat among those early hunters and warriors single
individuals one in a century? one in a thousand
years? saw what others did not; saw that the deer
was beautiful as well as edible, that hunting was fun
as well as necessary, dreamed that his gods might be
not only powerful but holy. But as long as each of
these percipient persons dies without finding a kin-
96}
FRIENDSHIP
dred soul, notMng (I suspect) will come of it; art or
sport or spiritual religion will not be born. It is when
two such persons discover one another, when,
whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate
fumblings or with what would seem to us amazingand elliptical speed, they share their vision it is
then that Friendship is bom. And instantly they
stand together in an immense solitude.
V Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude
about them, this barrier between them and the herd,
whether they want it or not. They would be glad to
reduce it. The first two would be glad to find a third.
In our own time Friendship arises in the same way.
For us of course the shared activity and therefore the
companionship on which Friendship supervenes will
not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It
may be a common religion, common studies, a com-
mon profession, even a common recreation. All who
share it will be our companions; but one or two or
three who share something more will be our Friends.
In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love
me? means Do you see the same truth? Or at least,
"Do you care about the same truth?" The man who
agrees with us that some question, little regarded by
others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He
need not agree with us about the answer.
Notice that Friendship thus repeats on a more
individual and less socially necessary level the char-
acter of the Companionship which was its matrix.
973
THE FOUR LOVES
The Companionship was between people who were
doing something together hunting, studying, paint-
ing or what you will. The Friends will still be doing
something together, but something more inward, less
widely shared and less easily defined; still hunters,
but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating,
but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take
account of; still travelling companions, but on a dif-
ferent kind of journey. Hence we picture lovers face
to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.
That is why those pathetic people who simply
"want friends" can never make anyAThe very con-
dition of having Friends is that we should want some-
thing else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer
to the question Do you see the same truth? would be
"I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I
only want a Friend," no Friendship can arise
though Affection of course may. There would be
nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friend-
ship must be about something, even if it were only an
enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those whohave nothing can share nothing; those who are goingnowhere can have no fellow-travellers.
"4 When the two people who thus discover that they
are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the
friendship which arises between them will very easily
pass may pass in the first half-hour into erotic
love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to
198}
FRIENDSHIP
each other or unless one or both already loves else-
where, it Is almost certain to do so sooner or later.
And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship
between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating
the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a
clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and
full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly
revealed as also your lover you will certainly not
want to share the Beloved's erotic love with anythird. But you will have no jealousy at all about
sharing the Friendship. Nothing so enriches an erotic
love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply,
truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with
the Friends you already had: to feel that not only
are we two united by erotic love but we three or four
or five are all travellers on the same quest, have all
a common vision.
The co-existence of Friendship and Eros may also
help some moderns to realise that Friendship is in
reality a love, and even as great a love as Eros. Sup-
pose you are fortunate enough to have "fallen in love
with" and married your Friend. And now suppose it
possible that you were offered the choice of two fu-
tures: "Either you two will cease to be lovers but
remain forever joint seekers of the same God, the
same beauty, the same truth, or else, losing all that,
you will retain as long as you live the raptures and
ardours, all the wonder and the wild desire of Eros.
99}
THE FOUR LOVES
Choose which you please." Which should we choose?
Which choice should we not regret after we had made
it?
I have stressed the "unnecessary" character of
Friendship, and this of course requires more justi-
fication than I have yet given it.
It could be argued that Friendships are of prac-
tical value to the Community. Every civilised religion
began in a small group of friends. Mathematics ef-
fectively began when a few Greek friends got together
to talk about numbers and lines and angles. What is
now the Royal Society was originally a few gentlemen
meeting in their spare time to discuss things which
they (and not many others) had a fancy for. What
we now call "the Romantic Movement" once was
Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge talking inces-
santly (at least Mr. Coleridge was) about a secret
vision of their own. Communism, Tractarianism,
Methodism, the movement against slavery, the Ref-
ormation, the Renaissance, might perhaps be said,
without much exaggeration, to have begun in the
same way.
There is something in this. But nearly every reader
would probably think some of these movements goodfor society and some bad. The whole list, if accepted,
would tend to show, at best, that Friendship is both a
possible benefactor and a possible danger to the com-
munity. And even as a benefactor it would have, not
so much survival value, as what we may call "civili-
{100]
FRIENDSHIP
sation-value"; would be something (in Aristotelian
phrase) which helps the community not to live but
to live well. Survival value and civilisation value coin-
cide at some periods and in some circumstances, but
not in all. What at any rate seems certain is that
when Friendship bears fruit which the communitycan use it has to do so accidentally, as a by-product.
Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman
emperor-worship or modern attempts to "sell" Chris-
tianity as a means of "saving civilisation," do not
come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn
their backs on the "World" are those who really
transform it. Egyptian and Babylonian Mathematics
were practical and social, pursued in the service of
Agriculture and Magic. But the free Greek Mathe-
matics, pursued by Friends as a leisure occupation,
have mattered to us more.
Others again would say that Friendship is ex-
tremely useful, perhaps necessary for survival, to the
individual. They could produce plenty of authority:
"bare is back without brother behind it" and "there
is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother." But
when we speak thus we are using friend to mean
"ally." In ordinary usage friend means, or should
mean, more than that. A Friend will, to be sure,
prove himself to be also an ally when alliance be-
comes necessary; will lend or give when we are in
need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us amongour enemies, do what he can for our widows and
101]
THE FOUR LOVES
orphans. But such good offices are not the stuff of
Friendship. The occasions for them are almost in-
terruptions. They are in one way relevant to it, in
another not. Relevant, because you would be a false
friend if you would not do them when the need arose;
irrelevant, because the role of benefactor always re-
mains accidental, even a little alien, to that of Friend.
It is almost embarrassing. For Friendship is utterly
free from Affection's need to be needed. We are
sorry that any gift or loan or night-watching should
have been necessary and now, for heaven's sake,
let us forget all about it and go back to the things we
really want to do or talk of together. Even gratitude
is no enrichment to this love. The stereotyped "Don't
mention it" here expresses what we really feel. The
mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be
given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but
that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.
It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible
waste of the time, always too short, that we had to-
gether. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in
which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it
has had to be devoted toaffairsfj^
*
For of course we do not want to know our Friend's
affairs at all. Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisi-
tive. You become a man's Friend without knowing or
caring whether he is married or single or how he
earns his living. What have all these "unconcerning
things, matters of fact" to do with the real question,
t!02}
FRIENDSHIP
Do you see the same truth? In a circle of true Friends
each man is simply what he is; stands for nothing
but himself. No one cares twopence about any one
else's family, profession, class, income, race, or pre-
vious history. Of course you will get to know about
most of these in the end. But casually. They will
come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an
analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for
their own sake. That is the kingHness of Friendship.
We meet like sovereign princes of independent states,
abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts.
This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical
bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of
our family, job, past and connections. At home,
besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general
character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief,
colleague or subordinate. Not among our Friends.
It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked per-
sonalities.
Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the ex-
quisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love.
I have no duty to He anyone's Friend and no man in
the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no
shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like
philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God
did not need to create) . It has no survival value;
rather it is one of those things which give value to
survival.
U03}
THE FOUR LOVES
When I spoke of Friends as side by side or shoulder
to shoulder I was pointing a necessary contrast be-
tween their posture and that of the lovers whom we
picture face to face. Beyond that contrast I do not
want the image pressed. The common quest or vision
which unites Friends does not absorb them in such a
way that they remain ignorant or oblivious of one
another. On the contrary it is the very medium in
which their mutual love and knowledge exist. One
knows nobody so well as one's "fellow." Every step
of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests
are tests we fully understand because we are under-
going them ourselves. Hence, as he rings true time
after time, our reliance, our respect and our admira-
tion blossom into an Appreciative love of a singu-
larly robust and well-informed kind. If, at the outset,
we had attended more to hirq and less to the thing
our Friendship is "about," we should not have come
to know or love him so well. You will not find the
warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by
staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better
fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, praywith him.
In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I
think, often so great and so firmly based that each
member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, hum-
bled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what
he is doing there among Ms betters. He is lucky be-
yond desert to be in such company. Especially when
{104}
FRIENDSHIP
the whole group is together, each bringing out all
that is best, wisest, or funniest in all theothers^
Those
are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after
a hard day's walking have come to our inn; when
our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the
blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole
world, and something beyond the world, opens itself
to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim
on or any responsibility for another, but aE are free-
men and equals as if we had first met an hour ago,
while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the
years enfolds us. Life natural life has no better
gift to give. Who could have deserved it?
From what has been said it will be clear that in
most societies at most periods Friendships will be
between men and men or between women and women.
The sexes will have met one another in Affection and
in Eros but not in this love. For they will seldom have
had with each other the companionship in common
activities which is the matrix of Friendship. Where
men are educated and women not, where one sex
works and the other is idle, or where they do totally
different work, they will usually have nothing to be
Friends about. But we can easily see that it is this
lack, rather than anything in their natures, which
excludes Friendship; for where they can be com-
panions they can also become Friends. Hence in a
profession (like my own) where men and women
work side by side, or in the mission field, or among
105}
THE FOUR LOVES
authors and artists, such Friendship is common. To
be sure, what is offered as Friendship on one side
may be mistaken for Eros on the other, with painful
and embarrassing results. Or what begins as Friend-
ship in both may become also Eros. But to say that
something can be mistaken for, or turn into, some-
thing else is not to deny the difference between them.
Rather it implies it; we should not otherwise speak of
"turning into" or being "mistaken for."
In one respect our own society is unfortunate. Aworld where men and women never have common
work or a common education can probably get along
comfortably enough. In it men turn to each other,
and only to each other, for Friendship, and they en-
joy it very much. I hope the women enjoy their
feminine Friends equally. Again, a world where all
men and women had sufficient common ground for
this relationship could also be comfortable. At pres-
ent, however, we fall between two stools. The neces-
sary common ground, the matrix, exists between the
sexes in some groups but not in others. It is notably
lacking in many residential suburbs. In a plutocratic
neighbourhood where the men have spent their whole
lives in acquiring money some at least of the womenhave used their leisure to develop an intellectual life
have become musical or literary. In such places the
men appear among the women as barbarians amongcivilised people. In another neighbourhood you will
find the situation reversed. Both sexes have, indeed,
C106}
FRIENDSHIP
"been to school." But since then the men have had a
much more serious education; they have become
doctors, lawyers, clergymen, architects, engineers, or
men of letters. The women are to them as children to
adults. In neither neighbourhood is real Friendship
between the sexes at all probable. But this, though an
impoverishment, would be tolerable if it were admit-
ted and accepted. The peculiar trouble of our own
age is that men and women in this situation, haunted
by rumours and glimpses of happier groups where
no such chasm between the sexes exists, and bedev-
illed by the egalitarian idea that what is possible for
some ought to be (and therefore is) possible to all,
refuse to acquiesce in it. Hence, on the one hand, we
get the wife as school-marm, the "cultivated" woman
who is always trying to bring her husband "up to her
level." She drags him to concerts and would like him
to learn morris-dancing and invites "cultivated" peo-
ple to the house. It often does surprisingly little harm.
The middle-aged male has great powers of passive
resistance and (if she but knew) of indulgence;
"women will have their fads." Something much more
painful happens when it is the men who are civilised
and the women not, and when all the women, and
many of the men too, simply refuse to recognise the
fact.
When this happens we get a kind, polite, laborious
and pitiful pretence. The women are "deemed" (as
lawyers say) to be full members of the male circle.
107}
THE FOUR LOVES
The fact in Itself not important that they now
smoke and drink like the men seems to simple-minded
people a proof that they really are. No stag-parties
are allowed. Wherever the men meet, the women
must come too. The men have learned to live amongideas. They know what discussion, proof and illus-
tration mean. A woman who has had merely school
lessons and has abandoned soon after marriage
whatever tinge of "culture" they gave her whose
reading is the Women's Magazines and whose gen-
eral conversation is almost wholly narrative cannot
really enter such a circle. She can be locally and
physically present with it in the same room. What of
that? If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent
through a conversation which means nothing to her.
If they are better bred, of course, they try to bring
her in. Things are explained to her: people try to
sublimate her irrelevant and blundering observations
into some kind of sense. But the efforts soon fail and,
for manners' sake, what might have been a real dis-
cussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gos-
sip, anecdotes, and jokes. Her presence has thus
destroyed the very thing she was brought to share.
She can never really enter the circle because the circle
ceases to be itself when she enters it as the horizon
ceases to be the horizon when you get there. Bylearning to drink and smoke and perhaps to tell
risque stories, she has not, for this purpose, drawn
an inch nearer to the men than her grandmother.
U08J
FRIENDSHIPBut her grandmother was far happier and more real-
istic. She was at home talking real women's talk to
other women and perhaps doing so with great charm,sense and even wit. She herself might be able to dothe same. She may be quite as clever as the men whose
evening she has spoiled, or cleverer. But she is not
really interested in the same things, nor mistress of
the same methods. (We all appear as dunces when
feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.)
The presence of such women, thousands strong,
helps to account for the modern disparagement of
Friendship. They are often completely victorious.
They banish male companionship, and therefore male
Friendship, from whole neighbourhoods. In the onlyworld they know, an endless prattling "Jolly" re-
places the intercourse of minds. All the men theymeet talk like women while women are present.
This victory over Friendship is often unconscious.
There is, however, a more militant type of womanwho plans it. I have heard one say "Never let two
men sit together or they'll get talking about some
subject and then there'll be no fun." Her point could
not have been more accurately made. Talk, by all
means; the more of it the better; unceasing cascades
of the human voice; but not, please, a subject. Thetalk must not be about anything.
This gay lady this lively, accomplished, "charm-
ing," unendurable bore was seeking only each
evening's amusement, making the meeting "go." But
1109}
THE FOUR LOVES
the conscious war against Friendship may be fought
on a deeper level. There are women who regard it
with hatred, envy and fear as the enemy of Eros and,
perhaps even more, of Affection.1A woman of that
sort has a hundred arts to break up her husband's
Friendships. She will quarrel with his Friends herself
or, better still, with their wives. She will sneer, ob-
struct and He. She does not realise that the husband
whom she succeeds in isolating from his own kind
wiH not be very well worth having; she has emascu-
lated him. She will grow to be ashamed of him her-
self. Nor does she remember how much of his life
lies in places where she cannot watch him. New
Friendships will break out, but this time they will be
secret. Lucky for her, and lucky beyond her deserts,
if there are not soon other secrets as well.
All these, of course, are silly women. The sensible
women who, if they wanted, would certainly be able
to qualify themselves for the world of discussion and
ideas, are precisely those who, if they are not quali-
fied, never try to enter it or to destroy it. They have
other fish to fry. At a mixed party they gravitate to
one end of the room and talk women's talk to one
another. They don't want us, for this sort of purpose,
any more than we want them. It is only the riff-raff of
each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the
other. Live and let live. They laugh at us a good deal.
That is just as it should be. Where the sexes, havingno real shared activities, can meet only in Affection
tl 10}
FRIENDSHIP
and Eros cannot be Friends it is healthy that
each should have a lively sense of the other's absurd-
ity. Indeed it is always healthy. No one ever really
appreciated the other sex just as no one really
appreciates children or animals without at times
feeling them to be funny. For both sexes are. Human-
ity is tragi-coniical; but the division into sexes enables
each to see in the other the joke that often escapes
it in itself and the pathos too.
I gave warning that this chapter would be largely
a rehabilitation. The preceding pages have, I hope,
made clear why to me at least it seems no wonder if
our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that
raised us almost above humanity. This love, free from
instinct, free from all duties but those which love has
freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy,
and free without qualification from the need to be
needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love
one can imagine between angels. Have we here found
a natural love which is Love itself?
Before we rush to any such conclusion let us be-
ware of the ambiguity in the word spiritual There
are many New Testament contexts in which it means
"pertaining to the (Holy) Spirit," and in such con-
texts the spiritual is, by definition, good. But when
spiritual is used simply as the opposite of corporeal,
or instinctive, or animal, this is not so. There is
spiritual evil as well as spiritual good. There are un-
holy, as well as holy, angels. The worst sins of men
Cl 1U
THE FOUR LOVES
are spiritual. We must not think that in finding
Friendship to be spiritual we have found it to be in
itself holy or inerrant Three significant facts remain
to be taken into account.
The first, already mentioned, is the distrust which
Authorities tend to have of close Friendships amongtheir subjects. It may be unjustified; or there maybe some basis for it.
Secondly, there is the attitude of the majority to-
wards all circles of close Friends. Every name they
give such a circle is more or less derogatory. It is at
best a "set"; lucky if not a coterie, a "gang," a "little
senate," or a "mutual admiration society." Those
who in their own lives know only Affection, Com-
panionship and Eros, suspect Friends to be "stuck-up
prigs who think themselves too good for us." Of
course this is the voice of Envy. But Envy always
brings the truest charge, or the charge nearest to the
truth, that she can think up; it hurts more. This
charge, therefore, will have to be considered.
Finally, we must notice that Friendship is very
rarely the image under which Scripture represents the
love between God and Man. It is not entirely neg-
lected; but far more often, seeking a symbol for the
highest love of all, Scripture ignores this seemingly
almost angelic relation and plunges into the depth of
what is most natural and instinctive. Affection is
taken as the image when God is represented as our
{112]
FRIENDSHIP
Father; Eros, when Christ Is represented as the
Bridegroom of the Church.
Let us begin with the suspicions of those in Au-
thority. I think there is a ground for them and that a
consideration of this ground brings something impor-
tant tolight. Friendship, I have said, is born at the
moment when one man says to another "What! Youtoo? I thought that no one but myself . . ," But the
common taste or vision or point of view which Is thus
discovered need not always be a nice one. From such
a moment art, or philosophy, or an advance in reli-
gion or morals might well take their rise; but whynot also torture, cannibalism, or human sacrifice?
Surely most of us have experienced the ambivalent
nature of such moments in our own youth? It was
wonderful when we first met someone who cared for
our favourite poet. What we had hardly understood
before now took clear shape. What we had been half
ashamed of we now freely acknowledged. But it was
no less delightful when we first met someone who
shared with us a secret evil. This too became far more
palpable and explicit; of this too, we ceased to be
ashamed. Even now, at whatever age, we all know
the perilous charm of a shared hatred or grievance.
(It is difficult not to hail as a Friend the only other
man in College who really sees the faults of the Sub-
Warden.)
Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold
Cl 13}
THE FOUR LOVES
certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to
avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be
right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an
hour in ten minutes these same views and stand-
ards become once more indisputable. The opinion
of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of
a thousand outsiders: as Friendship strengthens, it
will do this even when my Friends are far away. For
we all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men
"after our own heart." Only they really know our
mind and only they judge it by standards we fully
acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet
and the blame we really dread. The little pockets of
early Christians survived because they cared exclu-
sively for the love of "the brethren" and stopped their
ears to the opinion of the Pagan society all round
them. But a circle of criminals, cranks, or perverts
survives in just the same way; by becoming deaf to
the opinion of the outer world, by discounting it as
the chatter of outsiders who "don't understand," of
the "conventional," "the bourgeois," the "Establish-
ment," of prigs, prudes and humbugs.It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on
Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of seces-
sion, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious
thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists
against accepted good sense; of real artists against
popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised
taste; of good men against the badness of society or
1 14}
FRIENDSHIP
of bad men against Its goodness. Whichever it is, it
will be unwelcome to Top People. In each knot of
Friends there is a sectional "public opinion" which
fortifies its members against the public opinion of the
community in general. Each therefore is a pocket of
potential resistance. Men who have real Friends are
less easy to manage or "get at"; harder for goodAuthorities to correct or for bad Authorities to cor-
rupt. Hence if our masters, by force or by propagandaabout "Togetherness" or by unobtrusively making
privacy and unplanned leisure impossible, ever suc-
ceed in producing a world where all are Companionsand none are Friends, they will have removed certain
dangers, and will also have taken from us what is
almost our strongest safeguard against complete ser-
vitude.
But the dangers are perfectly real. Friendship (as
the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also
(as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambiva-
lent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.
It would be a waste of time to elaborate the point.
What concerns us is not to expatiate on the badness
of bad Friendships but to become aware of the pos-
sible danger in good ones. This love, like the other
natural loves, has its congenital liability to a particu-
lar disease.
It will be obvious that the element of secession, of
indifference or deafness (at least on some matters) to
the voices of the outer world, is common to all
1115}
THE FOUR LOVES
Friendships, whether good, bad, or merely innocu-
ous. Even if the common ground of the Friendship
is nothing more momentous than stamp-collecting,
the circle rightly and inevitably ignores the views of
the millions who think it a silly occupation and of
the thousands who have merely dabbled in it. The
founders of meteorology rightly and inevitably ig-
nored the views of the millions who still attributed
storms to witchcraft. There is no offence in this. As I
know that I should be an Outsider to a circle of
golfers, mathematicians, or motorists, so I claim the
equal right of regarding them as Outsiders to mine.
People who bore one another should meet seldom;
people who interest one another, often.
The danger is that this partial indifference or deaf-
ness to outside opinion, justified and necessary
though it is, may lead to a wholesale indifference or
deafness. The most spectacular instances of this can
be seen not in a circle of Friends but in a Theocratic
or aristocratic class. We know what the Priests in
Our Lord's time thought of the common people. The
Knights in Froissart's chronicles had neither sympa-
thy nor mercy for the "outsiders," the churls or peas-
antry. But this deplorable indifference was very
closely intertwined with a good quality. They really
had, among themselves, a very high standard of
valour, generosity, courtesy and honour. This stand-
ard the cautious, close-fisted churl would have
thought merely silly. The Knights, in maintaining
1161
FRIENDSHIP
it, were, and had to be, wholly indifferent to Msviews. They "didn't give a damn" what he thought.If they had, our own standard today would be the
poorer and the coarser for it. But the habit of "not
giving a damn" grows on a class. To discount the
voice of the peasant where it really ought to be dis-
counted makes it easier to discount his voice whenhe cries for justice or mercy. The partial deafness
which is noble and necessary encourages the whole-
sale deafness which is arrogant and inhuman.
A circle of Friends cannot of course oppress the
outer world as a powerful social class can. But it is
subject, on its own scale, to the same danger. It can
come to treat as "outsiders" in a general (and deroga-
tory) sense those who were quite properly outsiders
for a particular purpose. Thus, like an aristocracy,it can create around it a vacuum across which novoice will carry. The literary or artistic circle which
began by discounting, perhaps rightly, the plainman's ideas about literature or art may come to dis-
count equally his idea that they should pay their
bills, cut their nails and behave civilly. Whatever
faults the circle has and no circle is without them
thus become incurable. But that is not all. The par-tial and defensible deafness was based on some kind
of superiority even if it were only a superior knowl-
edge about stamps. The sense of superiority will
then get itself attached to the total deafness. The
group will disdain as well as ignore those outside it
117}
THE FOUR LOVES
It will, in effect, have turned itself into something
very like a class. A coterie is a self-appointed aris-
tocracy.
I said above that in a good Friendship each mem-
ber often feels humility towards the rest. He sees that
they are splendid and counts himself lucky to be
among them. But unfortunately the they and them
are also, from another point of view we and us. Thus
the transition from individual humility to corporate
pride is very easy.
I am not thinking of what we should call a social
or snobbish pride: a delight in knowing, and being
known to know, distinguished people. That is quite a
different thing. The snob wishes to attach himself
to some group because it is already regarded as an
elite; friends are in danger of coining to regard them-
selves as an elite because they are already attached.
We seek men after our own heart for their own sake
and are then alarmingly or delightfully surprised bythe feeling that we have become an aristocracy. Not
that we'd call it that. Every reader who has known
Friendship will probably feel inclined to deny with
some heat that his own circle was ever guilty of such
an absurdity. I feel the same. But in such matters it
is best not to begin with ourselves. However it maybe with us, I think we have all recognised some such
tendency in those other circles to which we are the
Outsiders.
118}
FRIENDSHIP
I was once at some kind of conference where two
clergymen, obviously close friends, began talking
about "uncreated energies" other than God. I asked
how there could be any uncreated things except Godif the Creed was right in calling Him the "maker of
all things visible and invisible." Their reply was to
glance at one another and laugh. I had no objection
to their laughter, but I wanted an answer in words as
well. It was not at all a sneering or unpleasant laugh-
It expressed very much what Americans would ex-
press by saying "Isn't he cute?" It was like the laugh-
ter of jolly grown-ups when an enfant terrible asks
the sort of question that is never asked. You can
hardly imagine how inoffensively it was done, nor
how clearly it conveyed the impression that they were
fully aware of living habitually on a higher plane
than the rest of us, of coming among us as Knights
among churls or as grown-ups among children.
Very possibly they had an answer to my question
and knew that I was too ignorant to follow it.
If they had said in so many words "I'm afraid it
would take too long to explain," I would not be
attributing to them the pride of Friendship. The
glance and the laugh are the real point the audible
and visible embodiment of a corporate superiority
taken for granted and unconcealed. The almost com-
plete inoffensiveness, the absence of any apparent
wish to wound or exult (they were very nice young
119}
THE FOUR LOVES
men) really underline the Olympian attitude. Here
was a sense of superiority so secure that it could
afford to be tolerant, urbane, unemphatic.
This sense of corporate superiority is not always
Olympian; that is, tranquil and tolerant. It may be
Titanic; restive, militant and embittered. Another
time, when I had been addressing an undergraduate
society and some discussion (very properly) followed
my paper, a young man with an expression as tense
as that of a rodent so dealt with me that I had to
say, "Look, sir. Twice in the last five minutes youhave as good as called me a liar. If you cannot dis-
cuss a question of criticism without that kind of thing
I must leave." I expected he would do one of two
things; lose his temper and redouble his insults, or
else blush and apologise. The startling thing is that
he did neither. No new perturbation was added to the
habitual malaise of his expression. He did not repeat
the Lie Direct; but apart from that he went on just
as before. One had come up against an iron curtain.
He was forearmed against the risk of any strictly
personal relation, either friendly or hostile, with such
as me. Behind this, almost certainly, there lies a cir-
cle of the Titanic sort self-dubbed Knights Tem-
plars perpetually in arms to defend a critical
Baphomet. We who are they to them do not exist
as persons at all. We are specimens; specimens of
various Age Groups, Types, Climates of Opinion, or
Interests, to be exterminated. Deprived of one
C1201
FRIENDSHIP
weapon, they coolly take up another. They are not,
in the ordinary human sense, meeting us at all; they
are merely doing a job of work spraying (I have
heard one iise that image) insecticide.
My two nice young clergymen and my not so nice
Rodent were on a high intellectual level. So were
that famous set who in Edwardian times reached the
sublime fatuity of calling themselves "the Souls." But
the same feeling of corporate superiority can possess
a group of much more commonplace friends. It will
then be flaunted in a cruder way. We have all seen
this done by the "old hands" at school talking in the
presence of a new boy, or two Regulars in the Army
talking before a "Temporary"; sometimes by very
loud and vulgar friends to impress mere strangers in
a bar or a railway carriage. Such people talk very
intimately and esoterically in order to be overheard.
Everyone who is not in the circle must be shown that
he is not in it. Indeed the Friendship may be "about"
almost nothing except the fact that it excludes. In
speaking to an Outsider each member of it delights to
mention the others by their Christian names or nick-
names; not although, but because, the Outsider won't
know who he means, A man I once knew was even
subtler. He simply referred to his friends as if we all
knew, certainly ought to know, who they were. "As
Richard Button once said to me ... ," he would
begin. We were all very young. We never dared to
admit that we hadn't heard of Richard Button. It
C121I
THE FOUR LOVES
seemed so obvious that to everyone who was anyone
he must be a household word; "not to know him ar-
gued ourselves unknown." Only much later did we
come to realise that no one else had heard of him
either. (Indeed I now have a suspicion that some of
these Richard Buttons, Hezekiah Cromwells, and
Eleanor Forsyths had no more existence than Mrs.
Harris. But for a year or so we were completely over-
awed.)
We can thus detect the pride of Friendship
whether Olympian, Titanic, or merely vulgar in
many circles of Friends. It would be rash to assume
that our own is safe from its danger; for of course it
is in our own that we should be slowest to recognise
it. The danger of such pride is indeed almost insepa-
rable from Friendly love. Friendship must exclude.
From the innocent and necessary act of excluding to
the spirit of exclusiveness is an easy step; and thence
to the degrading pleasure of exclusiveness. If that is
once admitted the downward slope will grow rapidly
steeper. We may never perhaps become Titans or
plain cads; we might which is in some ways worse
become "Souls." The common vision which first
brought us together may fade quite away. We shall
be a coterie that exists for the sake of being a coterie;
a little self-elected (and therefore absurd) aristocracy,
basking in the moonshine of our collective self-ap-
proval.
Sometimes a circle in this condition begins to dab-
122}
FRIENDSHIP
ble in the world of practice. Judiciously enlargingitself to admit recruits whose share in the original
common interest is negligible but who are felt to be
(in some undefined sense) "sound men/' it becomes
a power in the land. Membership of it comes to have
a sort of political Importance, though the politics
involved may be only those of a regiment, a college,
or a cathedral close. The manipulation of commit-
tees, the capture of jobs (for sound men) and the
united front against the Have-nots now become its
principal occupation, and those who once met to
talk about God or poetry now meet to talk about
lectureships or livings. Notice the justice of their doom.
"Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return,"
said God to Adam. In a circle which has thus dwin-
dled into a coven of wanglers Friendship has sunk
back again Into the mere practical Companionshipwhich was its matrix. They are now the same sort of
body as the primitive horde of hunters. Hunters, In-
deed, is precisely what they are; and not the kind of
hunters I most respect.
The mass of the people, who are never quite right,
are never quite wrong. They are hopelessly mistaken
in their belief that every knot of friends came into
existence for the sake of the pleasures of conceit and
superiority. They are, I trust, mistaken in their be-
lief that every Friendship actually indulges in these
pleasures. But they would seem to be right in diag-
nosing pride as the danger to which Friendships are
C123 J
THE FOUR LOVES
naturally liable. Just because this is the most spiritual
of loves the danger which besets it is spiritual too.
Friendship is even, if you like, angelic. But man needs
to be triply protected by humility if he is to eat the
bread of angels without risk.
Perhaps we may now hazard a guess why Scripture
uses Friendship so rarely as an image of the highest
love. It is already, in actual fact, too spiritual to be a
good symbol of Spiritual things. The highest does not
stand without the lowest. God can safely represent
Himself to us as Father and Husband because only a
lunatic would think that He is physically our sire or
that His marriage with the Church is other than mys-
tical. But if Friendship were used for this purpose
we might mistake the symbol for the thing symbol-
ised. The danger inherent in it would be aggravated.
We might be further encouraged to mistake that
nearness (by resemblance) to the heavenly life which
Friendship certainly displays for a nearness of ap-
proach.
Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is
unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual
and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even
more whole-heartedly than they, invoke the divine
protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider
how narrow its true path is. It must not become what
the people call a "mutual admiration society"; yet if
it is not full of mutual admiration, of Appreciative
love, it is not Friendship at all. For unless our lives
{124}
FRIENDSHIP
are to be miserably impoverished it must be for us
in our FriendsMps as it was for Christiana and her
party in The Pilgrim's Progress:
They seemed to be a terror one to the other, for that they
could not see that glory each one on herself which they
could see In each other. Now therefore they began to
esteem each other better than themselves. For you are
fairer than I am, said one; and you are more comelythan I am, said another.
There is in the long ran only one way in which we
can taste this illustrious experience with safety. And
Bunyan has indicated it in the same passage. It was
in the House of the Interpreter, after they had been
bathed, sealed and freshly clothed in "White Rai-
ment" that the women saw one another in this light.
If we remember the bathing, sealing and robing, we
shall be safe. And the higher the common ground of
the Friendship is, the more necessary the remem-
brance. In an explicitly religious Friendship, above
all, to forget it would be fatal.
For then it will seem to us that we we four or
five have chosen one another, the insight of each
finding the intrinsic beauty of the rest, like to Hke, a
voluntary nobility; that we have ascended above the
rest of mankind by our native powers. The other
loves do not invite the same illusion. Affection ob-
viously requires kinships or at least proximities
which never depended on our own choice. And as for
{125}
THE FOUR LOVES
Eros, half the love songs and half the love poems in
the world will tell you that the Beloved is your fate
or destiny, no more your choice than a thunderbolt,
for "it is not in our power to love or hate." Cupid's
archery, genes anything but ourselves. But in
Friendship, being free of all that, we think we have
chosen our peers. In reality, a few years' difference
in the dates of our births, a few more miles between
certain houses, the choice of one university instead
of another, posting to different regiments, the acci-
dent of a topic being raised or not raised at a first
meeting any of these chances might have kept us
apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speak-
ing, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies
has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples
"Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,"
can truly say to every group of Christian friends
"You have not chosen one another but I have chosen
you for one another." The Friendship is not a reward
for our discrimination and good taste in finding one
another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals
to each the beauties of all the others. They are no
greater than the beauties of a thousand other men;
by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. Theyare, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in
a good Friendship, increased by Him through the
Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for cre-
ating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is Hewho has spread the board and it is He who has
126}
FRIENDSHIP
chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, whosometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us
not reckon without our Host.
Not that we must always partake of it solemnly.
"God who made good laughter" forbid. It is one of
the difficult and delightful subtleties of life that we
must deeply acknowledge certain things to be serious
and yet retain the power and win to treat them often
as lightly as a game. But there will be a time for
saying more about this in the next chapter. For the
moment I will only quote Dunbar's beautifully bal-
anced advice:
Man, please thy Maker, and be merry,
And give not for this world a cherry.
1127}
CHAPTER V
EROS
/BY Eros I
mean of course that state which we call "being in
love"; or, if you prefer, that Mnd of love which lovers
are "in." Some readers may have been surprised
when, in an earlier chapter, I described Affection as
the love in which our experience seems to coine
closest to that of the animals. Surely, it might be
asked, our sexual functions bring us equally close?
This is quite true as regards human sexuality in
general. But I am not going to be concerned with
human sexuality simply as such. /Sexuality makes
part of our subject only when it becomes an ingre-
dient in the complex state of "being in love." That
sexual experience can occur without Eros, without
being "in love," and that Eros includes other things
besides sexual activity, I take for granted. If you
prefer to put it that way, I am inquiring not into the
sexuality which is common to us and the beasts or
even common to all men but into one uniquely hu-
man variation of it which develops within "love"
what I call Eros. The carnal or animally sexual ele-
ment within Eros, Jjntend (fol|bwin^an^
C13 1}
THE FOUR LOVES
to call Venus. And I mean by Venus what is sexual
not in some cryptic or rarefied sense such as a
depth-psychologist might explore but in a perfectly
obvious sense; what is known to be sexual by those
who experience it; what could be proved to be sexual
by the simplest observations.^
Sexuality may operate without Eros or as part of
Eros. Let me hasten to add that I make the distinc-
tion simply in order to limit our inquiry and without
any moral implications./,! am not at all subscribing
to the popular idea that it is the absence or presence
of Eros which makes the sexual act "impure" or
"pure," degraded or fine, unlawful or lawful. If all
who lay together without being in the state of Eros
were abominable, we all come of tainted stock. "The
times and places in which marriage depends on
Eros are in a small minority. Most of our ancestors
were married off in early youth to partners chosen
by their parents on grounds that had nothing to do
with Eros. They went to the act with no other "fuel,"
so to speak, than plain animal desire. And they did
right; honest Christian husbands and wives, obeying
their fathers and mothers, discharging to one another
their "marriage debt," and bringing up families in the
fear of the Lord. Conversely, this act, done under the
influence of a soaring and iridescent Eros which re-
duces the role of the senses to a minor consideration,
may yet be plain adultery, may involve breaking a
wife's heart, deceiving a husband, betraying a friend,
1132}
EROS
polluting hospitality and deserting your children. It
has not pleased God that the distinction between a
sin and a duty should turn on fine feelings. This act,
like any other, is justified (or not) by far more pro-saic and definable criteria; by the keeping or breakingof promises, by justice or injustice, by charity or
selfishness, by obedience or disobedience. My treat-
ment roles out mere sexuality sexuality without
Eros on grounds that have nothing to do with
morals; because it is irrelevant to our purpose.To the evolutionist Eros (the human variation)
will be something that grows out of Venus, a late
complication and development of the immemorial
biological impulse. We must not assume, however,that this is necessarily what happens within the con-
sciousness of the individual. There may be those whohave first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and
then gone on at a later stage to "fall in love with her."
But I doubt if this is at all commonj'Very often what
comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with
the Beloved a general, unspecified pre-occupationwith her in her totality. A man in this state really
hasn't leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinkingof a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less
important than the fact that she is herself. He is full
of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned.
If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply
would often be, "To go on thinking of her." He is
love's contemplative. And when at a later stage the
[133}
THE FOUR LOVES
explicitly sexual element awakes, lie will not feel
(unless scientific theories are influencing Mm) that
this had all along been the root of the whole matter.
He is more likely to feel that the incoming tide of
Eros, having demolished many sand-castles and
made islands of many rocks, has now at last with a
triumphant seventh wave flooded this part of his
nature also the little pool of ordinary sexuality
which was there on his beach before the tide came in.
Eros enters him like an invader, taking over and re-
organising, one by one, the institutions of a con-
quered country. It may have taken over many others
before it reaches the sex in him; and it will reorganise
that too.
No one has indicated the nature of that reorgani-
sation more briefly and accurately than George Or-
well, who disliked it and preferred sexuality in its
native condition, uncontaminated by Eros., In Nine-
teen Eighty-Four his dreadful hero (how much less
human than the four-footed heroes of his excellent
Animal Farm!), before towsing the heroine, de-
mands a reassurance, "You like doing this?" he asks,
"I don't mean simply me; I mean the thing in itself."
He is not satisfied till he gets the answer, "I adore
it." This little dialogue defines the reorganisation.
Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in
itself; Eros wants the Beloved.
The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event
occurring within one's own body.! We use a most
C134)
EROS
unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man
prowling the streets, that lie "wants a woman."
Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not
want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman hap-
pens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. Howmuch he cares about the woman as such may be
gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after frui-
tion (one does not keep the carton after one has
smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man
really want, not a woman, but one particular womana
In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion
the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure
she can give. No lover in the world ever sought the
embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a
calculation, however unconscious, that they would
be more pleasurable than those of any other woman.
If he raised the question he would, no doubt, expect
that this would be so. But to raise it would be to step
outside the world of Eros altogether. The only manI know of who ever did raise it was Lucretius, and he
was certainly not in love when he did. It is interesting
to note his answer. That austere voluptuary gave it
as Ms opinion that love actually impairs sexual pleas-
ure. The emotion was a distraction. It spoiled the
cool and critical receptivity of his palate. (A great
poet; but "Lord, what beastly fellows these Romans
were!")
The reader will notice that Eros thus wonderfully
transforms what is par excellence a Need-pleasure
C135}
THE FOUR LOVES
into the most Appreciative of all pleasures.It is the
nature of a Need-pleasure to show us the object
solely in relation to our need, even our momentary
need. But in Eros, a Need, at its most intense, sees
the object most intensely as a thing admirable in
herself, important far beyond her relation to the
lover's need.
If we had not all experienced this, if we were mere
logicians, we might boggle at the conception of de-
siring a human being, as distinct from desiring any
pleasure, comfort, or service that human being can
give. And it is certainly hard to explain. Lovers them-
selves are trying to express part of it (not much)
when they say they would like to "eat" one another,
Milton has expressed more when he fancies angelic
creatures with bodies made of light who can achieve
total interpenetration instead of our mere embraces.
Charles Williams has said something of it in the
words, "Love you? I am you."
Without Eros sexual desire, like every other de-
sire, is a fact about ourselves. Within Eros it is rather
about the Beloved. It becomes almost a mode of per-
ception, entirely a mode of expression. It feels ob-
jective; something outside us, in the real world. That
is why Eros, though the king of pleasures, always
(at Ms height) has the air of regarding pleasure as a
by-product. To think about it would plunge us back
in ourselves, in our own nervous system. It would kill
Eros, as you can "kill" the finest mountain prospect
{136}
EROS
by locating it all in yonr own retina and optic nerves.
Anyway, whose pleasure? For one of the first things
Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giv-
ing and receiving.
Hitherto I have been trying merely to describe, not
to evaluate. But certain moral questions now inev-
itably arise, and I must not conceal my own view of
them. It is submitted rather than asserted, and of
course open to correction by better men, better lovers
and better Christians.
It has been widely held in the past, and is perhaps
held by many unsophisticated people to-day, that the
spiritual danger of Eros arises almost entirely from
the carnal element within it; that Eros is "noblest"
or "purest" when Venus is reduced to the minimum.
The older moral theologians certainly seem to have
thought that the danger we chiefly had to guard
against in marriage was that of a soul-destroying
surrender to the senses. It will be noticed, however,
that this is not the Scriptural approach.1 St. Paul, dis-
suading his converts from marriage, says nothing
about that side of the matter except to discourage
prolonged abstinence from Venus (i Cor. VII, 5).
What he fears is pre-occupation, the need of con-
stantly "pleasing" that is, considering one's part-
ner, the multiple distractions of domesticity. It is
marriage itself, not the marriage bed, that will be
likely to hinder us from waiting uninterruptedly on
God. And surely St. Paul is right? If I may trust my
C137}
THE FOUR LOVES
own experience, it is (within marriage as without)
the practical and prudential cares of this world, and
even the smallest and most prosaic of those cares,
that are the great distraction. The gnat-like cloud of
petty anxieties and decisions about the conduct of the
next hour have interfered with my prayers more
often than any passion or appetite whatever. The
great, permanent temptation of marriage is not to
sensuality but (quite bluntly) to avarice.. With all
proper respect to the medieval guides, I cannot help
remembering that they were all celibates, and prob-
ably did not know what Eros does to our sexuality;
how, far from aggravating, he reduces the nagging
and addictive character of mere appetite. And that
not simply by satisfying it/ Eros, without diminishing
desire, makes abstinence easier. He tends, no doubt,
to a pre-occupation with the Beloved which can in-
deed be an obstacle to the spiritual life; but not
chiefly a sensual pre-occupation.
The real spiritual danger in Eros as a whole lies, I
believe, elsewhere. I will return to the point. For the
moment, I want to speak of the danger which at pres-
ent, in my opinion, especially haunts the act of love.
This is a subject on which I disagree, not with the
human race (far from it), but with many of its grav-
est spokesmen. I believe we are all being encouragedto take Venus too seriously; at any rate, with a wrongkind of seriousnessAAll my life a ludicrous and por-tentous solemnisation of sex has been going on.
138}
EROS
One author tells us that Venus should recur
through the married life in "a solemn, sacramental
rhythm," A young man to whom I had described as
"pornographic" a novel that he much admired, re-
plied with genuine bewilderment, "Pornographic?But how can it be? It treats the whole thing so seri-
ously" as if a long face were a sort of moral disin-
fectant. Our friends who harbour Dark Gods, the "pil-
lar of blood" school, attempt seriously to restore
something like the Phallic religion. Our advertise-
ments, at their sexiest, paint the whole business in
terms of the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout;
seldom a hint of gaiety. And the psychologists have
so bedevilled us with the infinite importance of com-
plete sexual adjustment and the all but impossibility
of achieving it, that I could believe some young
couples now go to it with the complete works of Freud,
Kraft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis and Dr. Stopes spread
out on bed-tables all round them. Cheery old Ovid,
who never either ignored a mole-hill or made a moun-
tain of it, would be more to the pointAWe have
reached the stage at which nothing is more needed
than a roar of old-fashioned laughter.
/ But, it will be replied, the thing is serious. Yes;
quadruply so. First, theologically, because this is the
body's share in marriage which, by God's choice, is
the mystical image of the union between God and
Man. Secondly, as what I will venture to call a sub-
Christian, or Pagan or natural sacrament, our human
{1393
THE FOUR LOVES
participation in, and exposition of, the natural forces
of life and fertility the marriage of Sky-Father and
Earth-Mother. Thirdly, on the moral level, in view of
the obligations involved and the incalculable mo-
mentousness of being a parent and ancestor. Finally
it has (sometimes, not always) a great emotional
seriousness in the minds of the participants.
But eating is also serious; theologically, as the
vehicle of the Blessed Sacrament; ethically in view of
our duty to feed the hungry; socially, because the
table is from time immemorial the place for talk;
medically, as all dyspeptics know. Yet we do not bring
bluebooks to dinner nor behave there as if we were
in church. And it is gourmets, not saints, who come
nearest to doing so. Animals are always serious about
food.:
We must not be totally serious about Venus. In-
deed we can't be totally serious without doing
violence to our humanity. It is not for nothing that
every language and literature in the world is full of
jokes about sex. Many of them may be duE or dis-
gusting and nearly all of them are old. But we must
insist that they embody an attitude to Venus which
in the long run endangers the Christian life far less
than a reverential gravity. We must not attempt to
find an absolute in the flesh. Banish play and laughter
from the bed of love and you may let in a false god-
dess. She will be even falser than the Aphrodite of the
Greeks; for they, even while they worshipped her,
f 1403
EROS
knew that she was "laughter-loving." The mass of
the people are perfectly right in their conviction that
Venus is a partly comic spirit. We are under no
obligation at all to sing all our love-duets in the throb-
bing, world-without-end, heart-breaking manner of
Tristan and Isolde; let us often sing like Papagenoand Papagena instead.
Venus herself will have a terrible revenge if we take
her (occasional) seriousness at its face value. Andthat in two ways. One is most comically thoughwith no comic intention illustrated by Sir Thomas
Browne when he says that her service is "the foolish-
est act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there
anything that will more deject his cool'd imagina-
tion, when he shall consider what an odd and un-
worthy piece of folly he hath committed." But if he
had gone about that act with less solemnity in the
first place he would not have suffered this "dejec-
tion." If Ms imagination had not been misled, its cool-
ing would have brought no such revulsion. But Venus
has another and worse revenge.
She herself is a mocking, mischievous spirit, far
more elf than deity, and makes game of us. When
all external circumstances are fittest for her service
she will leave one or both the lovers totally indisposed
for it. When every overt act is impossible and even
glances cannot be exchanged in trains, in shops,
and at interminable parties she will assail them
with all her force. An hour later, when time and place
1141}
THE FOUR LOVES
agree, she will have mysteriously withdrawn; per-
haps from only one of them. What a pother this must
raise what resentments, self-pities, suspicions,
wounded vanities and all the current chatter about
"frustration" in those who have deified her! But
sensible lovers laugh. It is all part of the game; a game
of catch-as-catch-can, and the escapes and tum-
bles and head-on collisions are to be treated as a
romp.For I can hardly help regarding it as one of God's
jokes that ajjassion so soaring, so apparently tran-
scendent, as Eros, should thus be linked in incongru-
ous symbiosis with a bodily appetite which, like any
other appetite, tactlessly reveals its connections with
such mundane factors as weather, health, diet, circu-
lation, and digestion. In Eros at times we seem to be
flying;]Vemfs gives us the sudden twitch that reminds
us we are really captive balloons. It is a continual
demonstration of the truth that we are composite
creatures, rational animals, akin on one side to the
angels, on the other to tom-cats. It is a bad thing not
to be able to take a joke. Worse, not to take a divine
joke; made, I grant you, at our expense, but also
(who doubts it?) for our endless benefit.
* Man has held three views of his body. First there is
that of those ascetic Pagans who called it the prison or
the "tomb" of the soul, and of Christians like Fisher
to whom it was a "sack of dung," food for worms,
filthy, shameful, a source of nothing but temptation
C142}
EROS
to bad men and humiliation to good ones. Then there
are the Neo-Pagans (they seldom know Greek), the
nudists and the sufferers from Dark Gods, to whomthe body is glorious. But thirdly we have the view
which St. Francis expressed by calling his body"Brother Ass." All three may be I am not sure
defensible; but give me St. Francis for my money.;
Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses
can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful,
sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriat-
ing beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot;
both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body.
There's no living with it till we recognise that one of
its functions in our lives is to play the part of buffoon.
Until some theory has sophisticated them, every man,
woman and child in the world knows this. The fact
that we have bodies is the oldest joke there is. Eros
(like death, figure-drawing, and the study of medi-
cine) may at moments cause us to take it with total
seriousness. The error consists in concluding that
Eros should always do so and permanently abolish
the joke. But this is not what happens. The very faces
of all the happy lovers we know make it clear. Lovers,
unless their love is very short-lived, again and again
feel an element not only of comedy, not only of play,
but even of buffoonery, in the body's expression of
Eros. And the body would frustrate us if this were
not so. It would be too clumsy an instrument to render
love's music unless its very clumsiness could be felt
C143}
THE FOUR LOVES
as adding to the total experience its own grotesque
charm a sub-plot or antimasque miming* with its
own hearty rough-and-tumble what the soul enacts in
statelier fashion. (Thus in old comedies the lyric
loves of the hero and heroine are at once parodied
and corroborated by some much more earthy affair
between a Touchstone and an Audrey or a valet and
a chambermaid.) The highest does not stand without
the lowest. There is indeed at certain moments a high
poetry in the flesh itself; but also, by your leave, an
irreducible element of obstinate and ludicrous un-
poetry. If it does not make itself felt on one occasion,
it will on another. Far better plant it foursquare within
the drama of Eros as comic relief than pretend youhaven't noticed it.
For indeed we require this relief. The poetry is there
as well as the un-poetry; the gravity of Venus as well
as her levity, the gravis ardor or burning weight of
desire. Pleasure., pushed to its extreme, shatters us
like pain. The longing for a union which only the
flesh can mediate while the flesh, our mutually ex-
cluding bodies, renders it forever unattainable can
have the grandeur of a metaphysical pursuit.
Amorousness as well as grief can bring tears to the
eyes. But Venus does not always come thus "entire,
fastened to her prey," and the fact that she sometimes
does so is the very reason for preserving always a hint
of playfulness in our attitude to her. When natural
{144}
EROS
things look most divine, the demoniac is just round
the corner.
This refusal to be quite immersed this recollec-
tion of the levity even when, for the moment, only the
gravity is displayed is especially relevant to a cer-
tain attitude which Venus, in her intensity, evokes
from most (I believe, not all) pairs of lovers. This
act can invite the man to an extreme, though short-
lived, masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror
or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly
extreme subjection and surrender. Hence the rough-
ness, even fierceness, of some erotic play; the "lover's
pinch which hurts and is desired." How should a sane
couple think of this? or a Christian couple permit it?
I think it is harmless and wholesome on one con-
dition. We must recognise that we have here to do
with what I called "the Pagan sacrament'* in sex. In
Friendship, as we noticed, each participant stands
for precisely himself the contingent individual he is.
But in the act of love we are not merely ourselves.
We are also representatives. It is here no impoverish-
ment but an enrichment to be aware that forces older
and less personal than we work through us/ In us all
the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is
assailant and responsive, are momentarily focused.
The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman
the Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter.
But we must give full value to the word play. Of
{145}
THE FOUR LOVES
course neither "plays a part" in the sense of being a
hypocrite. But each plays a part or role in well, in
something which is comparable to a mystery-play or
ritual (at one extreme) and to a masque or even a
charade (at the other).
"A woman who accepted as literally her own this
extreme self-surrender would be an idolatress offering
to a man what belongs only to God. And a man
would have to be the coxcomb of aE coxcombs, and
indeed a blasphemer, if he arrogated to himself, as
the mere person he is, the sort of sovereignty to which
Venus for a moment exalts himfBut what cannot law-
fully be yielded or claimed can be lawfully enacted/
Outside this ritual or drama he and she are two im-
mortal souls, two free-born adults, two citizens. Weshould be much mistaken if we supposed that those
marriages where this mastery is most asserted and
acknowledged in the act of Venus were those where
the husband is most likely to be dominant in the mar-
ried life as a whole; the reverse is perhaps more prob-
able. But within the rite or drama they become a godand goddess between whom therve is no equality
whose relations areasymmetricaLj
Some will think it strange I should find an element
of ritual or masquerade in that action which is often
regarded as the most real, the most unmasked and
sheerly genuine, we ever do. Are we not our true
selves when naked? In a sense, no. The word naked
was originally a past participle; the naked man was
146}
EROS
the man who had undergone a process of naking,
that Is, of stripping or peeling (you used the verb of
nuts and fruit). Time out of mind the naked man has
seemed to our ancestors not the natural but the ab-
normal man; not the man who has abstained from
dressing but the man who has been for some reason
undressed. And it is a simple fact anyone can ob-
serve it at a men's bathing place that nudity em-
phasises common humanity and soft-pedals what Is
Individual. In that way we are "more ourselves" when
clothed. By nudity the lovers cease to be solely John
and Mary; the universal He and She are emphasised.
You could almost say they put on nakedness as a
ceremonial robe or as the costume for a charade.
For we must still beware and never more than when
we thus partake of the Pagan sacrament in our love-
passages of being serious in the wrong way. The
Sky-Father himself is only a Pagan dream of One far
greater than Zeus and far more masculine than the
male. And a mortal man is not even the Sky-Father,
and cannot really wear his crown. Only a copy of It,
done in tinselled paper. I do not call it this in con-
tempt. I like ritual; I like private theatricals; I even
like charades. Paper crowns have their legitimate, and
(in the proper context) their serious, uses. They are
not in the last resort much flimsier ("if imagination
mend them") than all earthly dignities.
\ But I dare not mention this Pagan sacrament with-
out turning aside to guard against any danger of con-
C147}
THE FOUR LOVES
fusing it with an incomparably higher mystery. As
nature crowns man in that brief action, so the Chris-
tian law has crowned him in the permanent relation-
ship of marriage, bestowing or should I say, in-
flicting? a certain "headship" on him. This is a very
different coronation. And as we could easily take the
natural mystery too seriously, so we might take the
Christian mystery not seriously enough. Christian
writers (notably Milton) have sometimes spoken
of the husband's headship with a complacency to
make the blood run cold. We must go back to our
Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so
far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is
to love her as Christ loved the Church read on
and give his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This
headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the
husband we should all wish to be but in him whose
marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife
receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of
him., is in her own mere nature least lovable.
For the Church has no beauty but what the Bride-
groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her,
lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be
seen not in the joys of any man's marriage but in its
sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife
or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never
paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: for-
giveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the
flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on
C148}
earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or
wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the hus-
band whose headship is Christ-like (and he is al-
lowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a King
Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the
beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth
and wash behind her ears.
To say this is not to say that there is any virtue or
wisdom in making a marriage that involves such
misery. There is no wisdom or virtue in seeking un-
necessary martyrdom or deliberately courting per-
secution; yet it is, none the less, the persecuted or
martyred Christian in whom the pattern of the Master
is most unambiguously realised. So, in these terrible
marriages, once they have come about, the "head-
ship" of the husband, if only he can sustain it, is
most Christ-like.
The sternest feminist need not grudge my sex the
crown offered to it either in the Pagan or in the Chris-
tian mystery. For the one is of paper and the other
of thorns. The real danger is not that husbands may
grasp the latter too eagerly; but that they will allow
or compel their wives to usurp it.
From Venus, the carnal ingredient within Eros, I
now turn to Eros as a whole. Here we shall see the
same pattern repeated. As Venus within Eros does
not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at
happiness. We may think he does, but when he is
brought to the test it proves otherwise. Everyone
C149)
THE FOUR LOVES
knows that it is useless to try to separate lovers by
proving to them that their marriage will be an un-
happy one. This is not only because they will disbe-
lieve you. They usually will, no doubt. But even if
they believed, they would not be dissuaded. 4 For it is
the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had
rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be
happy on any other terms. Even if the two lovers are
mature and experienced people who know that
broken hearts heal in the end and can clearly foresee
that, if they once steeled themselves to go through
the present agony of parting, they would almost cer-
tainly be happier ten years hence than marriage is at
all likely to make them even then, they would not
part. To Eros all these calculations are irrelevant
just as the coolly brutal judgment of Lucretius is ir-
relevant to Venus. Even when it becomes clear be-
yond all evasion that marriage with the Beloved can-
not possibly lead to happiness when it cannot even
profess to offer any other life than that of tending an
incurable invalid, of hopeless poverty, of exile, or of
disgrace Eros never hesitates to say, "Better this
than parting. Better to be miserable with her than
happy without her. Let our hearts break provided
they break together." If the voice within us does not
say this, it is not the voice of Eros.
This is the grandeur and terror of love. But notice,
as before, side by side with this grandeur, the playful-
ness. Eros, as well as Venus, is the subject of count-
C150}
EROS
less jokes. And even when the circumstances of the
two lovers are so tragic that no bystander could keepback his tears, they themselves in want, in hospital
wards, on visitors' days in jail will sometimes be
surprised by a merriment which strikes the onlooker
(but not them) as unbearably pathetic. Nothing is
falser than the idea that mockery is necessarily
hostile. Until they have a baby to laugh at, lovers are
always laughing at each other.
It is in the grandeur of Eros that the seeds of
danger are concealed. He has spoken like a god. His
total commitment, his reckless disregard of happi-
ness, his transcendence of self-regard, sound like a
message from the eternal world.
And yet it cannot, just as it stands, be the voice
of God Himself. For Eros, speaking with that very
grandeur and displaying that very transcendence of
self, may urge to evil as well as to good. Nothing is
shallower than the belief that a love which leads to
sin is always qualitatively lower more animal or
more trivial than one which leads to faithful, fruit-
ful and Christian marriage. The love which leads to
cruel and perjured unions, even to suicide-pacts and
murder, is not likely to be wandering lust or idle sen-
timent. It may well be Eros in all his splendour; heart-
breakingly sincere; ready for every sacrifice except
renunciation.
There have been schools of thought which accepted
the voice of Eros as something actually transcendent
151}
THE FOUR LOVES
and tried to justify the absoluteness of his com-
mands. Plato will have it that "falling in love" is the
mutual recognition on earth of souls which have been
singled out for one another in a previous and celestial
existence. To meet the Beloved is to realise "We loved
before we were born." As a myth to express what
lovers feel this is admirable. But if one accepted it
literally one would be faced by an embarrassing con-
sequence. We should have to conclude that in that
heavenly and forgotten life affairs were no better
managed than here. For Eros may unite the most
unsuitable yokefellows; many unhappy, and predict-
ably unhappy, marriages were love-matches.
A theory more likely to be accepted in our own dayis what we may call Shavian Shaw himself might
have said "metabiological" Romanticism. Accord-
ing to Shavian Romanticism the voice of Eros is the
voice of the elan vital or Life Force, the "evolutionary
appetite." In overwhelming a particular couple it is
seeking parents (or ancestors) for the superman. It is
indifferent both to their personal happiness and to
the rules of morality because it aims at somethingwhich Shaw thinks very much more important: the
future perfection of our species. But if all this were
true it hardly makes clear whether and if so, whywe should obey it. All pictures yet offered us of the
superman are so unattractive that one might well
vow celibacy at once to avoid the risk of begetting
him. And secondly, this theory surely leads to the
E152)
EROS
conclusion that the Life Force does not very well
understand its (or her? or Ms?) own business. So
far as we can see the existence or intensity of Eros
between two people is no warrant that their offspringwill be especially satisfactory, or even that they will
have offspring at all. Two good "strains" (in the
stockbreeders' sense), not two good lovers, is the
recipe for fine cMldren. And what on earth was the
Life Force doing through all those countless genera-tions when the begetting of children depended verylittle on mutual Eros and very much on arranged mar-
riages, slavery, and rape? Has it only just thought of
this bright idea for improving the species?
Neither the Platonic nor the Shavian type of erotic
transcendentalism can help a Christian. We are not
worshippers of the Life Force and we know nothingof previous existences. We must not give uncondi-
tional obedience to the voice of Eros when he speaksmost like a god. Neither must we ignore or attempt to
deny the god-like quality. This love is really and truly
like Love Himself. In it there is a real nearness to
God (by Resemblance) ; but not, therefore and neces-
sarily, a nearness of Approach. Eros, honoured so far
as love of God and charity to our fellows will allow,
may become for us a means of Approach. His total
commitment is a paradigm or example, built into our
natures, of the love we ought to exercise towards Godand Man. As nature, for the nature-lover, gives a con-
tent to the word glory, so this gives a content to the
{153}
THE FOUR LOVES
word Chanty. It is as if Christ said to us through Eros,
"Thus just like this with this prodigality not
counting the cost you are to love me and the least
of my brethren." Our conditional honour to Eros
will of course vary with our circumstances. Of some a
total renunciation (but not a contempt) is required.
Others, with Eros as their fuel and also as their model,
can embark on the married life. Within which Eros,
of himself, will never be enough will indeed survive
only in so far as he is continually chastened and cor-
roborated by higher principles.
But Eros, honoured without reservation and
obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon. And this
is just how he claims to be honoured and obeyed.
Divinely indifferent to our selfishness, he is also de-
moniacally rebellious to every claim of God or Manthat would oppose him. Hence as the poet says:
People in love cannot be moved by kindness,
And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.
Martyrs is exactly right. Years ago when I wrote about
medieval love-poetry and described its strange, half
make-believe, "religion of love," I was blind enoughto treat this as an almost purely literary phenomenon.I know better now. Eros by his nature invites it. Of all
loves he is, at his height, most god-like; therefore
most prone to demand our worship. Of himself he
always tends to turn "being in love" into a sort of re-
ligion.
[154}
EROS
Theologians have often feared, in this love, a
danger of idolatry. I think they meant by this that
the lovers might idolise one another. That does not
seem to me to be the real danger; certainly not in
marriage. The deliciously plain prose and business-
like intimacy of married life render it absurd. So does
the Affection in which Eros is almost invariably
clothed. Even in courtship I question whether anyonewho has felt the thirst for the Uncreated, or even
dreamed of feeling it, ever supposed that the Beloved
could satisfy it. As a fellow-pilgrim pierced with the
very same desire, that is, as a Friend, the Beloved maybe gloriously and helpfully relevant; but as an object
for it well (I would not be rude), ridiculous. The
real danger seems to me not that the lovers will
idolise each other but that they will idolise Eros him-
self.
I do not of course mean that they will build altars
or say prayers to him. The idolatry I speak of can be
seen in the popular misinterpretation of Our Lord's
words "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven her,
for she loved much" (Luke VII, 47). From the con-
text, and especially from the , preceding parable of
the debtors, it is clear that this must mean: "The
greatness of her love for Me is evidence of the great-
ness of the sins I have forgiven her." (The for here is
like the for in "He can't have gone out, for his hat is
still hanging in the hall"; the presence of the hat is
not the cause of his being in the house but a probable
{155}
THE FOUR LOVES
proof that he is). But thousands of people take it
quite differently. They first assume, with no evidence,
that her sins were sins against chastity, though, for all
we know, they may have been usury, dishonest shop-
keeping, or cruelty to children. And they then take
Our Lord to be saying, "I forgive her unchastity be-
cause she was so much in love." The implication is
that a great Eros extenuates almost sanctions
almost sanctifies any actions it leads to.
When lovers say of some act that we might blame,
"Love made us do it," notice the tone. A man saying,
"I did it because I was frightened," or "I did it be-
cause I was angry," speaks quite differently. He is
putting forward an excuse for what he feels to require
excusing. But the lovers are seldom doing quite that.
Notice how tremulously, almost how devoutly, they
say the word love, not so much pleading an "extenu-
ating circumstance" as appealing to an authority.
The confession can be almost a boast. There can be
a shade of defiance in it. They "feel like martyrs." In
extreme cases what their words really express is a de-
mure yet unshakable allegiance to the god of love.
"These reasons in love's law have passed for good,"
says Milton's Dalila. That is the point; in love's law.
"In love," we have our own "law," a religion of our
own, our own god. Where a true Eros is present re-
sistance to his commands feels like apostasy, and
what are really (by the Christian standard) tempta-
tions speak with the voice of duties quasi-religious
C156}
duties, acts of pious zeal to love. He builds Ms own.
religion round the lovers. Benjamin Constant has
noticed how he creates for them, in a few weeks or
months, a joint past which seems to them im-
memorial. They recur to it continually with wonder
and reverence, as the Psalmists recur to the history
of Israel. It is in fact the Old Testament of Love's re-
ligion; the record of love's judgments and mercies
towards Ms chosen pair up to the moment when they
first knew they were lovers. After that, its New Testa-
ment begins. They are now under a new law, under
what corresponds (in this religion) to Grace. Theyare new creatures. The "spirit" of Eros supersedes all
laws, and they must not "grieve" it.
It seems to sanction all sorts of actions they would
not otherwise have dared. I do not mean solely, or
chiefly, acts that violate chastity. They are just as
likely to be acts of injustice or uncharity against the
outer world. They will seem like proofs of piety and
zeal towards Eros. The pair can say to one another in
an almost sacrificial spirit, "It is for love's sake that
I have neglected my parents left my children
cheated my partner failed my friend at his greatest
need." These reasons in love's law have passed for
good. The votaries may even come to feel a particular
merit in such sacrifices; what costlier offering can be
laid on love's altar than one's conscience?
And all the time the grim joke is that this Eros
whose voice seems to speak from the eternal realm
{157}
THE FOUR LOVES
is not himself necessarily even permanent. He is no-
toriously the most mortal of our loves. The world
rings with complaints of Ms fickleness. What is
baffling is the combination of this fickleness with Ms
protestations of permanency. To be in love is both to
intend and to promise lifelong fidelity. Love makes
vows unasked; can't be deterred from making them.
"I will be ever true," are almost the first words he ut-
ters. Not hypocritically but sincerely. No experience
will cure him of the delusion. We have all heard of
people who are in love again every few years; each
time sincerely convinced that "this time it's the real
thing," that their wanderings are over, that they have
found their true love and will themselves be true till
death.
Tl&nd yet Eros is in a sense right to make this prom-ise. The event of falling in love is of such a nature that
we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it
should be transitory. In one high bound it has over-
leaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made
appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness
aside as a triviality and planted the interests of an-
other in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and
without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one
person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is
an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all
if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even
(well used) a preparation for that. Simply to relapse
from it, merely to "fall out of" love again, is if I
1158}
EROS
may coin the ugly word a sort of disredemption.
Eros Is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot
perform.
Can we be in this selfless liberation for a lifetime?
Hardly for a week. Between the best possible lovers this
high condition is intermittent. The old self soon turns
out to be not so dead as he pretended as after a
religious conversion. In either he may be momentarilyknocked flat; he will soon be up again; if not on
his feet, at least on his elbow, if not roaring, at least
back to his surly grumbling or his mendicant whine.
And Venus will often slip back into mere sexuality.
But these lapses will not destroy a marriage be-
tween two "decent and sensible" people. The couple
whose marriage will certainly be endangered by
them, and possibly ruined, are those who have
idolised Eros. They thought he had the power and
truthfulness of a god. They expected that mere feeling
would do for them, and permanently, all that was
necessary. When this expectation is disappointed
they throw the blame on Eros or, more usually, on
their partners. In reality, however, Eros, having made
his gigantic promise and shown you in glimpses what
its performance would be like, has "done his stuff."
He, like a godparent, makes the vows; it is we who
must keep them. It is we who must labour to bring
our daily life into even closer accordance with what
the glimpses have revealed. We must do the works of
Eros when Eros is not present. This all good lovers
159}
THE FOUR LOVES
know, though those who are not reflective or ar-
ticulate will be able to express it only in a few con-
ventional phrases about "taking the rough along with
the smooth," not "expecting too much," having "a
little common sense," and the like. And all goodChristian lovers know that this programme, modest
as it sounds, will not be carried out except by humil-
ity, charity and divine grace; that it is indeed the
whole Christian life seen from one particular angle.
Thus Eros, like the other loves, but more strikingly
because of his strength, sweetness, terror and high
port, reveals his true status. He cannot of himself be
what, nevertheless, he must be if he is to remain Eros.
He needs help; therefore needs to be ruled. The goddies or becomes a demon unless he obeys God. It
would be well if, in such case, he always died. But he
may live on, mercilessly chaining together two mutual
tormentors, each raw all over with the poison of hate-
rn-love, each ravenous to receive and implacably re-
fusing to give, jealous, suspicious, resentful, strug-
gling for the upper hand, determined to be free and
to allow no freedom, living on "scenes." Read Anna
Karenina, and4o not fancy that such things happen
only in Russia^The lovers' old hyperbole of "eating"
each other can come horribly near to the truth.
f 160}
CH A P T E R VI
CHARITY
WILLIAM Morris
wrote a poem called "Love Is Enough" and someone is
said to have reviewed it briefly in the words "It isn't."
Such has been the burden of this book. The natural
loves are not self-sufficient. Something else, at first
vaguely described as "decency and common sense,"
but later revealed as goodness, and finally as the
whole Christian life in one particular relation, must
come to the help of the mere feeling if fhe feeling is to
be kept sweet.
To say this is not to belittle the natural loves but
to indicate where their real glory lies. It is no dispar-
agement to a garden to say that it will not fence and
weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and
cut its own lawns. A garden is a good thing but that
is not the sort of goodness it has. It will remain a gar-
den, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone
does all these things to it. Its real glory is of quite a
different kind. The very fact that it needs constant
weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory. It
teems with life. It glows with colour and smells like
heaven and puts forward at every hour of a summer
I163J
THE FOUR LOVES
day beauties which man could never have created
and could not even, on his own resources, have im-
agined. If you want to see the difference between its
contribution and the gardener's, put the commonest
weed it grows side by side with his hoes, rakes, shears,
and packet of weed killer; you have put beauty,
energy and fecundity beside dead, sterile things. Just
so, our "decency and common sense" show grey and
deathlike beside the geniality of love. And when the
garden is in its full glory the gardener's contributions
to that glory will still have been in a sense paltry com-
pared with those of nature. Without life springing
from the earth, without rain, light and heat descend-
ing from the sky, he could do nothing. When he has
done all, he has merely encouraged here and discour-
aged there, powers and beauties that have a different
source. But his share, though small, is indispensable
and laborious. When God planted a garden He set a
man over it and set the man under Himself. When He
planted the garden of our nature and caused the
flowering, fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will
to "dress" them. Compared with them it is dry and
cold. And unless His grace comes down, like the rain
and the sunshine, we shall use this tool to little pur-
pose. But its laborious and largely negative serv-
ices are indispensable. If they were needed when the
garden was still Paradisal, how much more now when
the soil has gone sour and the worst weeds seem to
164}
CHARITY
thrive on it best? But heaven forbid we should work
in the spirit of prigs and Stoics. While we hack and
prune we know very well that what we are hacking
and pruning is big with a splendour and vitality which
our rational will could never of itself have supplied.
To liberate that splendour, to let it become fully what
it is trying to be, to have tall trees instead of scrubby
tangles, and sweet apples instead of crabs, is part of
our purpose.
But only part. For now we must face a topic that
I have long postponed. Hitherto hardly anything has
been said in this book about our natural loves as rivals
to the love of God. Now the question can no longer
be avoided. There were two reasons for my delay.
One already hinted is that this question is not
the place at which most of us need begin. It is seldom,
at the outset, "addressed to our condition." For most
of us the true rivalry lies between the self and the hu-
man Other, not yet between the human Other and
God. It is dangerous to press upon a man the duty
of getting beyond earthly love when his real difficulty
lies in getting so far. And it is no doubt easy enough
to love the fellow-creature less and to imagine that
this is happening because we are learning to love God
more, when the real reason may be quite different,
We may be only "mistaking the decays of nature for
the increase of Grace." Many people do not find it
really difficult to hate their wives or mothers. M.
165}
THE FOUR LOVES
Mauriac, in a fine scene, pictures the other disciples
stunned and bewildered by this strange command,
but not Judas. He laps it up easily.
But to have stressed the rivalry earlier in this book
would have been premature in another way also. The
claim to divinity which our loves so easily make can
be refuted without going so far as that. The loves
prove that they .are unworthy to take the place of God
by the fact that they cannot even remain themselves
and do what they promise to do without God's help.
Why prove that some petty princeling is not the
lawful Emperor when without the Emperor's support
he cannot even keep his subordinate throne and make
peace in his little province for half a year? Even for
their own sakes the loves must submit to be second
things if they are to remain the things they want to be.
In this yoke lies their true freedom; they "are taller
when they bow." For when God rules in a human
heart, though He may sometimes have to remove
certain of its native authorities altogether, He often
continues others in their offices and, by subjecting
their authority to His, gives it for the first time a firm
basis. Emerson has said, "When half-gods go, the
gods arrive." That is a very doubtful maxim. Better
say, "When God arrives (and only then) the half-
gods can remain." Left to themselves they either
vanish or become demons. Only in His name can they
with beauty and security "wield their little tridents."
The rebellious slogan "All for love" is really love's
{166}
CHARITY
death warrant (date of execution, for the moment,
left blank).
But the question of the rivalry, for these reasons
long postponed, must now be treated. In any earlier
period, except the nineteenth century, it would have
loomed large throughout a book on this subject. If
the Victorians needed the reminder that love is not
enough, older theologians were always saying very
loudly that (natural) love is likely to be a great deal
too much. The danger of loving our fellow-creatures
too little was less present to their minds than that of
loving them idolatrously. In every wife, mother, child
and friend they saw a possible rival to God. So of
course does Our Lord (Luke XIV, 26).
There is one method of dissuading us from
inordinate love of the fellow-creature which I find
myself forced to reject at the very outset. I do so with
trembling, for it met me in the pages of a great saint
and a great thinker to whom my own glad debts are
incalculable.
In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St.
Augustine describes the desolation in which the
death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confes-
sions IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what
comes, he says, of giving one's heart to anything but
God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your
happiness depend on something you may lose. If love
is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the
only Beloved who will never pass away.
THE FOUR LOVES
Of course this is excellent sense. Don't put your
goods in a leaky vessel. Don't spend too much on a
house you may be turned out of. And there is no man
alive who responds more naturally than I to such
canny maxims. I am a safety-first creature. Of all
arguments against love none makes so strong an
appeal to my nature as "Careful! This might lead youto suffering."
To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to myconscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to
myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If
I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was
never meant to confirm my congenital preference for
safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt
whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less.
And who could conceivably begin to love God on
such a prudential ground because the security (so
to speak) is better? Who could even include it amongthe grounds for loving? Would you choose a wife or
a Friend if it comps to that, would you choose a
dog in this spirit?^ One must be outside the world
of love, of all loves, before one thus calculates. Eros,
lawless Eros, preferring the Beloved to happiness, is
more like Love himself than this.
I think that this passage in the Confessions is less a
part of St. Augustine's Christendom than a hang-
over from the high-minded Pagan philosophies in
which he grew up. It is closer to Stoic "apathy" or
neo-Platonic mysticism than to charity. We follow
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One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of
Lazarus, and, loving all, yet had one disciple whom,in a special sense, he "loved." St. Paul has a higher
authority with us than St. Augustine St. Paul who
shows no sign that he would not have suffered like a
man, and no feeling that he ought not so to have
suffered, if Epaphroditus had died (Philem. II, 27).
Even if it were granted that insurances against
heartbreak were our highest wisdom, does God Him-
self offer them? Apparently not. Christ comes at last
to say "Why hast thou forsaken me?"
There is no escape along the lines St. Augustine
suggests. Nor along any other lines. There is no safe
investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love
anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and
possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keep-
ing it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not
even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with
hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements;
lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfish-
ness. But in that casket safe, dark, motionless, air-
less it will change. It will not be broken; it will be-
come unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The
alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of
tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven
where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers
and perturbations of love is Hell.
I believe that the most lawless and inordinate
loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-in-
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THE FOUR LOVES
vited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding
the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason.
"I knew thee that thou wert a hard man." Christ did
not teach and suffer that we might become, even in
the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness.
If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly
beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely
to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw
nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings
inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offer-
ing them to Him; throwing away all defensive ar-
mour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if
He chooses this as the way in which they should break,
so be it.
It remains certainly true that all natural loves can
be inordinate. Inordinate does not mean "insuffi-
ciently cautious." Nor does it mean "too big." It is
not a quantitative term. It is probably impossible
to love any human being simply "too much." We
may love him too much in proportion to our love
for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God,
not the greatness of our love for the man, that con-
stitutes the inordinacy. But even this must be refined
upon. Otherwise we shall trouble some who are very
much on the right road but alarmed because they
cannot feel towards God so warm a sensible emotion
as they feel for the earthly Beloved. It is much to be
wished at least I think so that we all, at all times,
could. We must pray that this gift should be given us.
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CHARITY
But the question whether we are loving God or the
earthly Beloved "more" is not, so far as concerns our
Christian duty, a question about the comparative
intensity of two feelings. The real question is, which
(when the alternative comes) do you serve, or choose,
or put first? To which claim does your will, in the last
resort, yield?
As so often, Our Lord's own words are both far
fiercer and far more tolerable than those of the theo-
logians. He says nothing about guarding against
earthly loves for fear we might be hurt; He says some-
thing that cracks like a whip about trampling them
all under foot the moment they hold us back from
following Him. "If any man come to me and hate not
his father and mother and wife . . . and Ms own
life also, he cannot be my disciple" {Luke XIV,
26).
But how are we to understand the word hate? That
Love Himself should be commanding what we ordi-
narily mean by hatred commanding us to cherish
resentment, to gloat over another's misery, to delight
in injuringhim is almost a contradiction in terms.
I think Our Lord, in the sense here intended, "hated"
St. Peter when he said, "Get thee behind me." To hate
is to reject, to set one's face against, to make no con-
cession to, the Beloved when the Beloved utters, how-
ever sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of
the Devil. A man, said Jesus, who tries to serve two
masters, will "hate" the one and "love" the other. It is
THE FOUR LOVES
not, surely, mere feelings of aversion and liking that
are here in question. He will adhere to, consent to,
work for, the one and not for the other. Consider again,
"I loved Jacob and I hated Esau" (Malachi I, 2-3).
How is the thing called God's "hatred" of Esau dis-
played in the actual story? Not at all as we might
expect. There is of course no ground for assuming
that Esau made a bad end and was a lost soul; the
Old Testament, here as elsewhere, has nothing to say
about such matters. And, from all we are told, Esau's
earthly life was, in every ordinary sense, a good deal
more blessed than Jacob's. It is Jacob who has all the
disappointments, humiliations, terrors, and bereave-
ments. But he has something which Esau has not.
He is a patriarch. He hands on the Hebraic tradition,
transmits the vocation and the blessing, becomes
an ancestor of Our Lord. The "loving" of Jacob seems
to mean the acceptance of Jacob for a high (and pain-
ful) vocation; the "hating" of Esau, his rejection. Heis "turned down," fails to "make the grade," is found
useless for the purpose. So, in the last resort, we
must turn down or disqualify our nearest and dearest
when they come between us and our obedience to
God. Heaven knows, it will seem to them sufficiently
like hatred. We must not act on the pity we feel; wemust be blind to tears and deaf to pleadings.
I will not say that this duty is hard; some find it
too easy; some, hard almost beyond endurance. What
is hard for all is to know when the occasion for such
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CHARITY
"hating" has arisen. Our temperaments deceive us.
The meek and tender uxorious husbands, submis-
sive wives, doting parents, dutiful children will not
easily believe that it has ever arrived. Self-assertive
people, with a dash of the bully in them, will believe it
too soon. That is why it is of such extreme importanceso to order our loves that it is unlikely to arrive at
an.
How this could come about we may see on a far
lower level when the Cavalier poet, going to the
wars, says to his mistress:
I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more.
There are women to whom the plea would be
meaningless. Honour would be just one of those silly
things that Men talk about; a verbal excuse for, there-
fore an aggravation of, the offence against "love's
law" which the poet is about to commit. Lovelace can
use it with confidence because his lady is a Cavalier
lady who already admits, as he does, the claims
of Honour. He does not need to "hate" her, to set his
face against her, for he and she acknowledge the
same law. They have agreed and understood each
other on this matter long before. The task of convert-
ing her to a belief in Honour is not now now,
when the decision is upon them to be undertaken.
It is this prior agreement which is so necessary when
a far greater claim than that of Honour is at stake. It
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THE FOUR LOVES
is too late, when the crisis comes, to begin telling a
wife or husband or mother or friend, that your love
all along had a secret reservation "under God"
or "so far as a higher Love permits." They ought to
have been warned; not, to be sure, explicitly, but bythe implication of a thousand talks, by the principle
revealed in a hundred decisions upon small matters.
Indeed, a real disagreement on this issue should make
itself felt early enough to prevent a marriage or a
Friendship from existing at all. The best love of either
sort is not blind. Oliver Elton, speaking of Carlyle
and Mill, said that they differed about justice, and
that such a difference was naturally fatal "to any
friendship worthy of the name." If "All" quite seri-
ously all "for love" is implicit in the Beloved's at-
titude, his or her love is not worth having. It is not
related in the right way to Love Himself.
And this brings me to the foot of the last steep
ascent this book must try to make. We must try to
relate the human activities called "loves" to that Love
which is God a little more precisely than we have yet
done. The precision can, of course, be only that of a
model or a symbol, certain to fail us in the long run
and, even while we use it, requiring correction from
other models. The humblest of us, in a state of Grace,
can have some "knowledge-by-acquaintance" {con-
naitre), some "tasting," of Love Himself; but maneven at his highest sanctity and intelligence has no
direct "knowledge about" (savoir) the ultimate Be-
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CHARITY
Ing only analogies. We cannot see light, though by
light we can see things. Statements about God are
extrapolations from the knowledge of other things
which the divine illumination enables us to know. I
labour these deprecations because, in what follows,
my efforts to be clear (and not intolerably lengthy)
may suggest a confidence which I by no means feel. I
should be mad if I did. Take it as one man's reverie,
almost one man's myth. If anything in it is useful to
you, use it; if anything is not, never give it a second
thought]
God is love. Again, "Herein Is love, not that we
loved God but that He loved us" (i John IV, 10) . Wemust not begin with mysticism, with the creature's
love for God, or with the wonderful foretastes of the
fruition of God vouchsafed to some in their earthly
life. We begin at the real beginning, with love as the
Divine energy. This primal love Is Gift-love. In God
there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plente-
ousness that desires to give. The doctrine that Godwas under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry
scholastic speculation. It is essential. Without it we
can hardly avoid the conception of what I can only
call a "managerial" God; a Being whose function or
nature is to "run" the universe, who stands to it as a
head-master to a school or a hotelier to a hotel. But
to be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to
God. In Himself, at home in "the land of the Trinity,"
he is Sovereign of a far greater realm. We must keep
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THE FOUR LOVES
always before our eyes that vision of Lady Julian's in
which God carried in His hand a little object like a
nut, and that nut was "all that is made." God, who
needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous
creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.
He creates the universe, already foreseeing or should
we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God the
buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back
pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven
through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient
suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture
of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's
sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image,
God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own
parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and
"take advantage of Him. Herein is love. This is the
diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.
God, as Creator of nature, implants in us both
Gift-loves and Need-loves. The Gift-loves are natural
images of Himself; proximities to Him by resemblance
which are not necessarily and in all men proximities
of approach. A devoted mother, a beneficent ruler or
teacher, may give and give, continually exhibiting
the likeness, without making the approach. The
Need-loves, so far as I have been able to see, have no
resemblance to the Love which God is. They are
rather correlatives, opposites; not as evil is the op-
posite of good, of course, but as the form of the blanc-
mange is an opposite to the form of the mould.
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CHARITY
But in addition to these natural loves God can be-
stow a far better gift; or rather, since our minds must
divide and pigeon-hole, two gifts.
He communicates to men a share of His own Gift-
love. This is different from the Gift-loves He has built
into their nature. These never quite seek simply the
good of the loved object for the object's own sake.
They are biased in favour of those goods they can
themselves bestow, or those which they would like
best themselves, or those which fit in with a pre-con-
ceived picture of the life they want the object to lead.
But Divine Gift-love Love Himself working in a
man is wholly disinterested and desires what is
simply best for the beloved. Again, natural Gift-love is
always directed to objects which the lover finds in
some way intrinsically lovable objects to which
Affection or Eros or a shared point of view attracts
him, or, failing that, to the grateful and the deserving,
or perhaps to those whose helplessness is of a winning
and appealing kind. But Divine Gift-love in the "man
enables him to love what is not naturally lovable;
lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the
superior and the sneering. Finally, by a high para-
dox, God enables men to have a Gift-love towards
Himself. There is of course a sense in which no one
can give to God anything which is not already His;
and if it is already His what have you given? But
since it is only too obvious that we can withhold our-
selves, our wills and hearts, from God, we can, in that
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THE FOUR LOVES
sense, also give them. What is His by right and would
not exist for a moment if it ceased to be His (as the
song is the singer's), He has nevertheless made ours
in such a way that we can freely offer it back to Him.
"Our wills are ours to make them Thine/' And as all
Christians know there is another way of giving to
God; every stranger whom we feed or clothe is Christ.
And this apparently is Gift-love to God whether we
know it or not. Love Himself can work in those who
know nothing of Him. The "sheep" in the parable
had no idea either of the God hidden in the prisoner
whom they visited or of the God hidden in themselves
when they made the visit. (I take the whole parable
to be about the judgment of the heathen. For it be-
gins by saying, in the Greek, that the Lord will sum-
mon all "the nations" before Him presumably, the
Gentiles, the Goyim.)
That such a Gift-love comes by Grace and should
be called Charity, everyone will agree. But I have to
add something which will not perhaps be so easily
admitted. God, as it seems to me, bestows two other
gifts; a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a su-
pernatural Need-love of one another. By the first I
do not mean the Appreciative love of Himself, the
gift of adoration. What little I have to say on that
higher that highest subject will come later. I
mean a love which does not dream of disinterested-
ness, a bottomless indigence. Like a river making its
own channel, like a magic wine which in being
[1781
CHARITY
poured out should simultaneously create the glassthat was to hold It, God turns our need of Him into
Need-love of Him. What is stranger still is that Hecreates in us a more than natural receptivity of Char-
ity from our fellow-men. Need Is so near greed andwe are so greedy already that it seems a strange grace,But I cannot get it out of my head that this is what
happens.
Let us consider first this supernatural Need-love
of Himself, bestowed by Grace. Of course the Grace
does not create the need. That is there already;
"given" (as the mathematicians say) in the merefact of our being creatures, and incalculably increased
by our being fallen creatures. What the Grace givesis the full recognition, the sensible awareness, the
complete acceptance even, with certain reserva-
tions, the glad acceptance of this Need. For, without
Grace, our wishes and our necessities are in con-
flict.
All those expressions of unworthiness which Chris-
tian practice puts into the believer's mouth seem to
the outer world like the degraded and insincere grov-
ellings of a sycophant before a tyrant, or at best a
fagon de parler like the self-depreciation of a Chinese
gentleman when he calls himself "this coarse and il-
literate person.95
In reality, however, they expressthe continually renewed, because continually neces-
sary, attempt to negate that misconception of our-
selves and of our relation to God which nature, even
U79}
THE FOUR LOVES
while we pray, is always recommending to us. Nosooner do we believe that God loves us than there is
an impulse to believe that He does so, not because He
is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable. The
Pagans obeyed this impulse unabashed; a good man
was "dear to the gods" because he was good. We, be-
ing better taught, resort to subterfuge. Far be it from.
us to think that we have virtues for which God could
love us. But then, how magnificently we have
repented! As Bunyan says, describing his first and
illusory conversion, "I thought there was no man in
England that pleased God better than I." Beaten out
of this, we next offer our own humility to God's ad-
miration. Surely He'll like that? Or if not that, our
clear-sighted and humble recognition that we still
lack humility. Thus, depth beneath depth and sub-
tlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering
idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness. It is
easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realise
for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we
are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines
upon us. Surely we must have a little however little
native luminosity? Surely we can't be quite crea-
tures?
For this tangled absurdity of a Need, even a Need-
love, which never fully acknowledges its own need-
iness, Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted
acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence.
We become "jolly beggars." The good man is sorry
U80}
CHARITYfor the sins which have increased Ms Need. He is not
entirely sorry for the fresh Need they have produced.And he is not sorry at all for the innocent Need that is
inherent in Ms creaturely condition. For all the time
this illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure,
this pretence that we have anything of our own or
could for one -hour retain by our own strength any
goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us from
being happy. We have been like bathers who want
to keep their feet or one foot or one toe on the
bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to sur-
render themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf.
The consequences of parting with our last claim to
intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom,
power and worth, really ours just because God givesthem and because we know them to be (in another
sense) not "ours." Anodos has got rid of his shadow.
But God also transforms our Need-love for one
another, and it requires equal transformation. In
reality we all need at times, some of us at most times,
that Charity from others which, being Love Himself
in them, loves the unlovable. But this, though a sort
of love we need, is not the sort we want We want to
be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fair-
ness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering
us the highest love of all is a terrible shock. This is
so well recognised that spiteful people will pretendto be loving us with Charity precisely because theyknow that it will wound us. To say to one who ex-
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THE FOUR LOVES
pects a renewal of Affection, Friendship, or Eros, "I
forgive you as a Christian" is merely a way of con-
tinuing the quarrel. Those who say it are of course
lying. But the thing would not be falsely said in order
to wound unless, if it were true, it would be wound-
ing.
How difficult it is to receive, and to go on receiv-
ing, from others a love that does not depend on our
own attraction can be seen from an extreme case.
Suppose yourself a man struck down shortly after
marriage by an incurable disease which may not kill
you for many years; useless, impotent, hideous, dis-
gusting; dependent on your wife's earnings; impov-
erishing where you hoped to enrich; impaired even
in intellect and shaken by gusts of uncontrollable
temper, full of unavoidable demands. And suppose
your wife's care and pity to be inexhaustible. The man
who can take this sweetly, who can receive all and
give nothing without resentment, who can abstain
even from those tiresome self-depreciations which
are really only a demand for petting and reassurance,
is doing something which Need-love in its merely
natural condition could not attain. (No doubt such
a wife will also be doing something beyond the reach
of a natural Gift-love, but that is not the point at
present.) In such a case to receive is harder and per-
haps more blessed than to give. But what the extreme
example illustrates is universal. We are all receiving
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CHARITY
Charity. There is something in each of us that can-
not be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do
not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally
loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste
of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. Wecan be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of It,
with Charity; no other way. All who have good par-
ents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at
some times and perhaps at all times in respect of
some one particular trait or habit they are receiv-
ing Charity, are loved not because they are lovable
but because Love Himself is in those who love them.
Thus God, admitted to the human heart, trans-
forms not only Gift-love but Need-love; not only our
Need-love of Him, but our Need-love of one another.
This is of course not the only thing that can happen.
He may come on what seems to us a more dreadful
mission and demand that a natural love be totally re-
nounced. A high and terrible vocation, like Abraham's,
may constrain a man to turn his back on his own
people and his father's house. Eros, directed to a for-
bidden object, may have to be sacrificed. In such in-
stances, the process, though hard to endure, is easy
to understand. What we are more likely to overlook
is the necessity for a transformation even when the
natural love is allowed to continue.
In such a case the Divine Love does not substitute
itself for the natural as if we had to throw away our
U83}
THE FOUR LOVES
silver to make room for the gold. The natural loves
are summoned to become modes of Charity while
also remaining the natural loves they were.
One sees here at once a sort of echo or rhyme or
corollary to the Incarnation itself. And this need not
surprise us, for the Author of both is the same. As
Christ is perfect God and perfect Man, the natural
loves are called to become perfect Charity and also
perfect natural loves. As God becomes Man "Not byconversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking
of the Manhood into God," so here; Charity does not
dwindle into merely natural love but natural love is
taken up into, made the tuned and obedient instru-
ment of, Love Himself.
How this can happen, most Christians know. All
the activities (sins only excepted) of the natural loves
can in a favoured hour become works of the glad
and shameless and grateful Need-love or of the
selfless, unofficious Gift-love, which are both Charity.
Nothing is either too trivial or too animal to be thus
transformed. A game, a joke, a drink together, idle
chat, a walk, the act of Venus all these can be
modes in which we forgive or accept forgiveness, in
which we console or are reconciled, in which we"seek not our own." Thus in our very instincts, ap-
petites and recreations, Love has prepared for Him-
self "a body."
But I said "in a favoured hour." Hours soon pass.
The total and secure transformation of a natural love
184}
CHARITYinto a mode of Charity is a work so difficult that per-
haps no fallen man has ever come within sight of
doing it perfectly. Yet the law that loves must beso transformed is, I suppose, inexorable.
One difficulty is that here, as usual, we can take a
wrong turn. A Christian a somewhat too vocallyChristian circle or family, having grasped this prin-
ciple, can make a show, in their overt behaviour and
especially in their words, of having achieved the thingitself an elaborate, fussy, embarrassing and intol-
erable show. Such people make every trifle a matter
of explicitly spiritual importance out loud and to
one another (to God, on their knees, behind a closed
door, it would be another matter). They are always
unnecessarily asking, or insufferably offering, forgive-ness. Who would not rather live with those ordinary
people who get over their tantrums (and ours) un-
emphatically, letting a meal, a night's sleep, or a
joke mend all? The real work must be, of all our
works, the most secret. Even as far as possible secret
from ourselves. Our right hand must not know what
our left is doing. We have not got far enough if we
play a game of cards with the children "merely" to
amuse them or to show that they are forgiven. If this
is the best we can do we are right to do it. But it
would be better if a deeper, less conscious, Charitythrew us into a frame of mind in which a little fun
with the children was the thing we should at that
moment like best.
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THE FOUR LOVES
We are, however, much- helped in this necessary
work by that very feature of our experience at which
we most repine. The invitation to turn our natural
loves into Charity is never lacking. It is provided bythose frictions and frustrations that meet us in all of
them; unmistakable evidence that (natural) love is
not going to be "enough" unmistakable, unless we
are blinded by egotism. When we are, we use them
absurdly. "If only I had been more fortunate in mychildren (that boy gets more like his father every
day) I could have loved them perfectly." But every
child is sometimes infuriating; most children are not
infrequently odious. "If only my husband were more
considerate, less lazy, less extravagant" . . . "If
only my wife had fewer moods and more sense, and
were less extravagant" . . . "If my father wasn't so
infernally prosy and close-fisted." But in everyone,
and of course in ourselves, there is that which re-
quires forbearance, tolerance, forgiveness. The ne-
cessity of practising these virtues first sets us, forces
us, upon the attempt to turn more strictly, to let
God turn our love into Charity. These frets and
rubs are beneficial. It may even be that where there
are fewest of them the conversion of natural love is
most difficult. When they are plentiful the necessity
of rising above it is obvious. To rise above it when it
is as fully satisfied and as little impeded as earthly
conditions allow to see that we must rise when all
seems so well already this may require a subtler
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CHARITY
conversion and a more delicate insight. In this wayalso it may be hard for "the rich" to enter the King-dom.
And yet, I believe, the necessity for the conversion
is inexorable; at least, if our natural loves are to enter
the heavenly life. That they can enter it most of us
in fact believe. We may hope that the resurrection of
the body means also the resurrection of what may be
called our "greater body"; the general fabric of our
earthly life with its affections and relationships. But
only on a condition; not a condition arbitrarily laid
down by God, but one necessarily inherent in the
character of Heaven: nothing can enter there which
cannot become heavenly. "Flesh and blood," mere
nature, cannot inherit that Kingdom. Man can ascend
to Heaven only because the Christ, who died and
ascended to Heaven, is "formed in him." Must we not
suppose that the same is true of a man's loves? Onlythose into which Love Himself has entered will ascend
to Love Himself. And these can be raised with Him
only if they have, in some degree and fashion, shared
His death; if the natural element in them has
submitted year after year, or in some sudden agony
to transmutation. The fashion of this world passes
away. The very name of nature implies the transitory.
Natural loves can hope for eternity only in so far as
they have allowed themselves to be taken into the
eternity of Charity; have at least allowed the process
to begin here on earth, before the night comes when
U87}
THE FOUR LOVES
no man can work. And the process will always in-
volve a kind of death. There is no escape. In my love
for wife or friend the only eternal element is the trans-
forming presence of Love Himself. By that presence,
if at all, the other elements may hope, as our physical
bodies hope, to be raised from the dead. For this only
is holy in them, this only is the Lord.
Theologians have sometimes asked whether we
shall "know one another" in Heaven, and whether
the particular love-relations worked out on earth
would then continue to have any significance. It
seems reasonable to reply: "It may depend what kind
of love it had become, or was becoming, on earth."
For, surely, to meet in the eternal world someone for
whom your love in this, however strong, had been
merely natural, would not be (on that ground) even
interesting. Would it not be like meeting in adult life
someone who had seemed to be a great friend at
your preparatory school solely because of commoninterests and occupations? If there was nothing more,
if he was not a kindred soul, he will now be a total
stranger. Neither of you now plays conkers. You no
longer want to swop your help with his French exer-
cise for his help with your arithmetic. In Heaven I
suspect, a love that had never embodied Love Him-
self would be equally irrelevant. For Nature has passed
away. All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
But I must not end on this note, I dare not and
all the less because longings and terrors of my own
{188}
CHARITY
prompt me to do so leave any bereaved and deso-
late reader confirmed in the widespread illusion that
reunion with the loved dead is the goal of the Chris-
tian life. The denial of this may sound harsh and un-
real in the ears of the broken hearted, but it must be
denied.
"Thou hast made us for thyself," said St. Augus-tine, "and our heart has no rest till it comes to Thee."
This, so easy to believe for a brief moment before the
altar or, perhaps, half-praying, half-meditating in an
April wood, sounds like mockery beside a deathbed.
But we shall be far more truly mocked if, casting this
way, we pin our comfort on the hope perhaps even
with the aid of seance and necromancy of some
day, this time forever, enjoying the earthly Beloved
again, and no more. It is hard not to imagine that
such an endless prolongation of earthly happinesswould be completely satisfying.
But, if I may trust my own experience, we get at
once a sharp warning that there is something wrong.The moment we attempt to use our faith in the other
world for this purpose, that faith weakens. The mo-ments in my life when it was really strong have all
been moments when God Himself was central in mythoughts. Believing in Him, I could then believe in
Heaven as a corollary. But the reverse process be-
lieving first in reunion with the Beloved, and then, for
the sake of that reunion, believing in Heaven, and
finally, for the sake of Heaven, believing in God
1 189}
THE FOUR LOVES
this will not work. One can of course imagine things.
But a self-critical person will soon be increasingly
aware that the imagination at work is his own; he
knows he is only weaving a fantasy. And simpler
souls will find the phantoms they try to feed on void
of all comfort and nourishment, only to be stimulated
Into some semblance of reality by pitiful efforts of
self-hypnotism, and perhaps by the aid of ignoble pic-
tures and hymns and (what is worse) witches.
We find thus by experience that there is no good
applying to Heaven for earthly comfort. Heaven can
give heavenly comfort; no other kind. And earth
cannot give earthly comfort either. There is no earthly
comfort in the long run.
For the dream of finding our end, the thing we
were made for, in a Heaven of purely human love
could not be true unless our whole Faith were wrong.We were made for God. Only by being in some re-
spect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His
beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has
any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that
we have loved them too much, but that we did not
quite understand what we were loving. It is not
that we shall be asked to turn from them, so
dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face
of God we shall know that we have always known it.
He has been a party to, has made, sustained and
moved moment by moment within, all our earthly
experiences of innocent love. All that was true love
U90J
CHARITY
in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours,
and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be
no anguish and no duty of turning away from our
earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned
already; from the portraits to the Original, from the
rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made
lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we
shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than
them we shall love them more than we now do.
But all that is far away in "the land of the Trinity,"
not here in exile, in the weeping valley. Down here it
is all loss and renunciation. The very purpose of the
bereavement (so far as it affects ourselves) may have
been to force this upon us. We are then compelled to
try to believe, what we cannot yet feel, that God is
our true Beloved. That is why bereavement is in some
ways easier for the unbeliever than for us. He can
storm and rage and shake his fist at the universe,
and (if he is a genius) write poems like Housman's
or Hardy's. But we, at our lowest ebb, when the least
effort seems too much for us, must begin to attempt
what seem impossibilities.
"Is it easy to love God?" asks an old author. "It is
easy," he replies, "to those who do it" I have in-
cluded two Graces under the word Charity. But God
can give a third. He can awake in man, towards
Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love. This is of
all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our nat-
ural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true centre of
I19U
THE FOUR LOVES
all human and angelic life. With this all things are
possible.
And with this, where a better book would begin,
mine must end. I dare not proceed. God knows,
not I, whether I have ever tasted this love. Perhaps I
have only imagined the tasting. Those like myself
whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are
subject to a just penalty; we easily imagine condi-
tions far higher than any we have really reached. If
we describe what we have imagined we may make
others, and make ourselves, believe that we have
really been there. And if I have only imagined it, is
it a further delusion that even the imagining has at
some moments made all other objects of desire
yes, even peace, even to have no more fears look
like broken toys and faded flowers? Perhaps. Perhaps,
for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to
speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God
ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we
cannot "practice the presence of God/' it is some-
thing to practice the absence of God, to become in-
creasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like
men who should stand beside a great cataract and
(hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a
mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream
who stretches out Ms hand to visible objects and gets
no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreamingis to be no longer perfectly asleep. But for news of the
fully waking world you .must go to my betters.
{192}
"Great expectations always attend the ap-
pearance of a new book by C. S. Lewis.
Practically no modern writer commands his
special gifts of wit, fervor, reason and mean-
ing." WASHINGTON STAR
C. S. LEWIS has played a rich part in both
the intellectual and scholarly life of England
by virtue of his captivatingly original mind
and his brilliant style, which have estab-
lished him on both sides of the Atlantic as
one of the most celebrated writers of our
time. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ire-
land, in 1898. Following his youth and early
education, so much of which was poignantly
recounted in Surprised by Joy, he entered
Oxford University in 1917. Before a term
had passed, however, he enlisted in the
British Army. Commissioned a second lieu-
tenant, he served in France, where he was
wounded. He returned to Oxford at the war's
end, first as a student, and then as a teacher.
At present he holds the Chair of Medieval
and Renaissance English Literature at Cam-
bridge University.
Mr. Lewis is the author of an impressive
array of more than a score of books, both
popular and scholarly, among them, The
Screwtape Letters, Till We Have Faces, Re-
flections on the Psalms, and The World's
Last Night.
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